2015 read #2: All Clear by Connie Willis.

All Clear by Connie Willis
642 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 4 to January 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Spoilers ahead, be warned.

In the end, of course, the thousand or so pages of time travelers just barely missing each other, of plot running in circles, of waiting and stalling and worrying and waiting some more throughout both of these books -- in the end, this all has thematic relevance. Disappointingly, that theme is just a bloated, much less charming repeat of To Say Nothing of the Dog's denouement: the conceit that time travelers are a way for the space-time continuum to fix itself, as it were, to make sure certain small actions registered in a chaotic system, rather than a hazard to the proper course of history, which the travelers spend so much time worrying about. To be fair, there probably isn't all that much else to say, thematically speaking, in a "realistic" depiction of time travel, but after this ground was covered so elegantly in To Say Nothing, I feel like I read through a whole lot of fake cliffhangers and "We totally just altered the events of history and the Nazis will win for sure... oh, wait, no, sorry, we didn't really change a thing" stingers and ever so much historical padding to reach conclusions already spelled out in the previous (and far superior) Oxford time travel adventure.

Well... all that historical padding shouldn't be in the negative column with the fakeout cliffhangers and the constant (and needless) bellyaching about changing the continuum when really everything was fine. The historical padding might be a tad generous, but it's the most engaging and fascinating part of both Blackout and All Clear. Willis has gotten me interested in reading books about World War II -- no small achievement, considering I'd long thought it the most prettied-up, morally sanitized, and Hollywood-ready of all twentieth century conflicts (perhaps because it was the last war in which America, despite some slip-ups, could unequivocally claim to be the good guys). I came this close to picking up a history of the Dunkirk evacuations earlier tonight, before the library closed. If there are any good books on the British homefront war or the French resistance, I want them.

Blackout and All Clear form an ambitious diptych that, unfortunately, became an obvious case of the story getting away from the author. It would be too glib to say "This would be an excellent novel at half the length," but my feelings are somewhere in that neighborhood.