RA Crossroads: Doomsday Book by Connie Willis 

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By Neal Wyatt Jun 2, 2011

As Lewis Carroll's Alice so aptly points out, "What is the use of a book...without pictures or conversations?" Welcome to RA Crossroads, where books, movies, music, and other media converge and whole-collection reader's advisory service goes where it may. In this column, time travel and the plague lead me down a winding path.

Begin:

Willis, Connie. Doomsday Book. Spectra. 1993. 592p. ISBN 9780553562736. pap. $7.99.
In this graceful and evocative sf novel, Willis explores the impact of catastrophic illness on human society, plumbing the noblest impulses and the most banal, frantic, and craven tendencies of her richly created characters. Kivrin, a student studying at Oxford during an era when time travel is common and history students conduct on-site and in-time studies, is sent back to the Middle Ages. Both Kivrin and her tutor, Mr. Dunworthy, believe she is traveling back to a relatively safe year-after all, the rules prevent all sorts of dangers. Yet danger from the past haunts present-day Oxford as a highly contagious and deadly flu mysteriously sweeps the city, leaving Kivrin cut off from her university town, stranded not in a safe time, but in the plague years of the Middle Ages. With a building pace and detailed settings that make both the Middle Ages and the quarantined Oxford palpably real, readers quickly become invested in the fate of both times. Exquisitely plotted and wrenchingly visceral, Willis's story makes readers feel the trauma of the sicknesses even as she explores the heroic determination with which some of her characters face them. Readers new to Willis might have already discovered her through her new two-part novel, Blackout and All Clear, also part of the Oxford time-travel works. Readers who have yet to relish the pleasures of Willis's setting should read the Oxford titles in order, starting with Doomsday Book, then To Say Nothing of the Dog, and finally Blackout and All Clear in one go, as Blackout ends abruptly and restarts in All Clear, as if Willis had run out of paper.

Read-Alikes:

Finney, Jack. Time and Again. Touchstone: S. & S. 1995. 400p. ISBN 9780684801056. pap. $14.95.
Matching Willis for rich and detailed plotting as well as a building pace and strong characterization, Finney's sf novel of time travel is set in the 1970s and the New York winter of 1882. The U.S. government thinks there is a way to travel back in time using mental projection and taps illustrator Si Morley to test its theory. Through wonderful descriptions of place (including illustrations within the novel), readers journey with Si to the past and witness all he discovers-things both lovely and disastrous. The focus on the experience of dislocation as well as the mystery that is woven into the plot should please Willis fans, while the differences in style and format make Finney's novel its own singularly wonderful experience.

Baker, Kage. In the Garden of Iden. Tor. 2005. 336p. ISBN 9780765314574. pap. $15.99.
Sharing with Willis and Finney the ability to capture readers beyond the sf genre, Baker's first novel in "The Company" series moves steadily, is intricately plotted, and, like Willis's book, is witty and serious at the same time. Owing to their similar styles and emphasis on moral issues and investigations into character, Baker makes a great next read for Willis fans. On the eve of her torture and death, Mendoza is rescued from the Inquisition by a cyborg named Joseph, a member of the 24th-century organization known as the Company. Given the choice to be remade as a cyborg or suffer the Inquisition, Mendoza elects to join the Company and is trained as a botanist, tasked with retrieving rare plants before they become extinct. Her first mission sends her to a richly evoked Renaissance England, where she discovers the true cost of her deal with Joseph.

Kress, Nancy. Steal Across the Sky. Tor. 2010. 384p. ISBN 9780765359568. pap. $7.99.
Though more straightforwardly sf, Kress also features a la Willis strong plotting skills, a building pace, and a focus on moral investigation-in particular, in this book, an attention to community and knowledge. Additionally, like Willis, Kress excels at character creation, and her female characters are well worth spending time with. In a not-so-distant future, aliens land on the moon and inform Earth that they are there to atone. Centuries ago, aliens took humans, genetically altering some of them, and seeded other planets with human "stock." They now seek witnesses to the aftermath. What the witnesses find changes how humanity understands itself: its collective life and passing.

Read-Arounds:

Voigt, Ellen Bryant. Kyrie: Poems. Norton. 1996. 80p. ISBN 9780393315615. pap. $12.95.
One of the most remarkable sections of Doomsday Book is the description of the Black Death overtaking a village. Voigt's collection of sonnets focused on the 1918 flu epidemic, which swept across much of the world following the Great War, offers a further experience to readers who marveled at Willis's ability to create such a visceral description and haunting tone. These poems are accessible and strongly narrative, painting lyrical images of fear, dread, and wrenching despair through multiple voices that are highly colloquial-asking their addressee to send two pies to boot camp, describing a bed as holding generations. Like Willis, Voigt brings time and place to life, filling the reader with an almost inescapable, and haunting, eyewitness feeling. As she writes in one poem, "O, O, the world wouldn't stop - ". Listen to Voigt read three of these poems at Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts (Voigt starts reading at 26:52, click on the audio button at the top right to begin playback).

Kelly, John. The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time. HarperCollins. 2006. 400p. ISBN 9780060006938. pap. $14.99.
For readers seeking more about the Middle Ages and the Black Death, Kelly's gripping and accessible history is a great place to start. Kelly is very descriptive, placing readers in the middle of filthy towns and decimated villages. He ably details the history of the times, the probable causes of the plague, and offers readers who are interested plenty of side trips that flesh out time and place. Kelly also explores the lasting and dramatic impact of the plague, exploring not only the emotional repercussions of such a wide-scale loss of human life but also the social and cultural ramifications that followed. He offers an easy reading experience, a richly described, largely narrative history that should suit readers looking for more background to Willis's story. For different approaches, see also William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples and Barbara W. Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.

Listen-Alikes:

Brooks, Geraldine. Year of Wonders. Books on Tape. 2001. ISBN 9780736675574. $72.
This wonderful historical novel of the English plague in the mid-1600s shares with Willis the central core questions of human choices in the face of despair, along with an emphasis on characterization, language, and period detail. While not sf, Brooks's story offers strong connections to Willis's tale. When the plague infects a small village, residents must decide to flee and possibly spread the disease to others or remain where they are and possibly succumb. Persuaded by the village rector that they must stay, most villagers face the plague, cared for by the rector, his wife, and Anna Frith, a young widow who narrates the story. Parallels to Willis abound, especially in the deft historical re-creation and the moral complexity at the heart of both novels. While the audio version of Doomsday Book is not a stellar experience, the reading of Brooks's novel by Josephine Bailey is a treasure and should please fans of Willis looking for aural experiences. Bailey reads with a lovely pace, allowing listeners to sink into Brooks's gorgeous prose, and with a tonal quality that becomes haunting.

Flynn, Michael. Eifelheim. Blackstone. 2007. ISBN 9781433206115. $72.
This sf novel should please Willis fans for its engaging method of presenting complex moral issues, its tense and evocative sensibility, its brilliant plotting, and its weaving of historical and current times. Read with great skill by Anthony Heald, this quickly draws listeners into the story of cosmologist Sharon Nagy and mathematical historian Tom Schwoerin, a couple who overlap research interests when both become intrigued by Eifelheim, a village in the Black Forest that disappeared during the plague of 1384. Though alternating story focus, Flynn details the events in Eifelheim as well where Pastor Dietrich discovers an alien race, crash-landed in the forest, and tries to incorporate the aliens into village life. Despite his best efforts, things go tragically wrong, as the Black Death swarms over Eifelheim. Heald narrates the story with a strong sense of discovery and wonder, keeping listener interest high and pulling us into the alternating sections of modern scientific quest and historical community and superstition.