Doomsday Book (1992)

I love this book so much. It might be my favorite. ( )

The Doomsday Book lives up to its name. The book is absolutely devastating.

Kivrin Engle is a historian in a world where historians do field-research by time-traveling. She has sought all her life to be the first historian to go back to the Middle Ages and her dream has come true: she is sent back to the year 1320 to do three weeks of research. But, yet, something goes wrong. Upon her arrival, she is deathly ill. Once Kivrin recovers, the book follows her life in the 14th-century household. And then the other shoe drops. The year is not 1320, but it is 1348, the year that the bubonic plague came to Oxfordshire. Here is the doomsday: Kivrin watches, helplessly, as everyone dies.

The book additionally follows the modern timeline. The technician in charge of Kivrin's "drop" into the past is struck immediately with the same illness that Kivrin faced and from his fevered rantings, it is obvious to Mr. Dunworthy, Kivrin's mentor-of-sorts, that something went wrong. It is among the lockdown and preventative measures taken in the modern era that Mr. Dunworthy tasks himself with finding what went wrong and how to fix it. There is a direct parallel between the Black Death in that timeline and the flu epidemic in the modern era. Even with the advances in modern medicine (remember - this is a world where they have *time travel*), many still die. Even Mr. Dunworthy himself comes down with it and so it is not until he recovers that he can stage his grand rescue mission for Kivrin. He finds her utterly shaken and brings her home.

Willis expertly traverses several themes here: from religion and the problem of evil to the conflict between man and nature. I think even the weaknesses of the book can be viewed as strengths: the length of time in the beginning where it drags and seems like there is no storyline to follow reveals itself as a way for us to get to know these medieval characters and for the pain of their deaths to be real to us. And Willis' portrayal of Kivrin's grief during all of this is sharp like a knife: we see her denial, her bargaining, and finally her acceptance (but not her peace). As I finished the book, I could not put it down and, yes, I was devastated at the end. ( )

This novel of 578 pages could easily have been 478, or even 378 pages. A 1993 Hugo Award Winner, I enjoyed the way it exposed the UK government national health care system as clearly inadequate. I will forever remember the 1961 Hugo Award Winner, Walter M. Miller, Jr's 'A Canticle for Leibowitz.' I will forever remember how long it took me to read Connie Willis' 'Doomsday Book.' ( )

Very long, and almost more of a story of dealing with pandemics (influenza in modern times, plague in middle ages). It dragged a little at some points, but was still very good. ( )

I really enjoyed this book, but I felt like it ended too early. I also felt like it focused too much on the "present" side of the story and not enough on the stuff in the past. ( )