Paul Weiss's Reviews > Doomsday Book

It might have been so much more!

It's 2048 AD and, while time travel is possible, it is closely controlled and subject to severe physical restrictions. Kivrin, a young student in the history faculty of twenty-first century Oxford University will be conducting a clandestine research visit to one of the most perilous and least understood periods of Middle Age England - the early fourteenth century just prior to the onset of the bubonic plague, the Black Death that wiped out entire families and villages and decimated the population of England and mainland Europe at the height of its spread.

Despite painstaking precautions and careful study of fourteenth century customs, language, religious practice, dress and appropriate etiquette, circumstances in plague-ridden England spiral out of Kivrin's control and she is forced to face the likelihood that she will not make the rendezvous that will allow her to return to the present. At the same time, an unknown epidemic spreads in present day England that seems strangely related to Kivrin's visit to the past and hampers the present day research team's best efforts to rescue Kivrin.

I have to give Connie Willis an A+ for a superb imaginative plotline but, for this reader, the execution was lacking. The events in present day England had the potential to be a riveting epidemiological search for an unknown illness that seemed to have its roots in the past. Instead, Willis seemed intent on spinning a needlessly repetitive story that focused on inanities - the quarantine on the university campus was causing concerns that there might be a shortage of toilet paper, for example, or the endless woes of a group of touring American bell-ringers who are unable to perform their full Christmas peal. Colin, one of the younger folks of the tale, is gifted with a vocabulary limited to endless irritating variations of "Necrotic!" or "Apocalyptic!"

Jumping back and forth from present to past and back again to the present seemed to have the result that neither story-line took firm root. Both stories remained mired in the mundane and neither approached compelling. Even with the rich panorama of medieval England on which to draw, Willis failed to paint a convincing picture of the Middle Ages. Most lovers of historical fiction want much, much more than Willis was able to give. On a more positive note, in the closing chapters Willis created a dark and deeply moving piece of pathos as Kivrin realizes the implications of her own inoculated immunity to the Black Death and her inability to stop the death of those around her.

A weak recommendation with the recognition that this is one of those novels on the edge ... some will enjoy and others, like myself, will find DOOMSDAY BOOK disappointing.

Paul Weiss