2020/031: The Doomsday Book -- Connie Willis

'In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can’t go.’
And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking, he thought. [p. 76]

After finishing Blackout / All Clear, I decided it was about time that I reread The Doomsday Book -- the first of Connie Willis' novels that I encountered, long ago and far away in the 1990s.

In some respects it has not aged well. The scenes in the fourteenth century are still excellent: but 1960s -- sorry, 2060s -- Oxford, with its lack of mobiles and email, with its mufflers and Americanisms and stubborn blinkered characters and lack of basic health and safety.... aargh. (To be fair, most of this did not bug me nearly as much on first reading.)

The premise: Kivrin is a young medievalist who persuades her supervisor, Professor Dunworthy, to send her to 1320s England. However, there are complications, and she ends up in 1348, when the countryside is ravaged by bubonic plague. Back (or forward) in 2060s Oxford, a plague -- a deadly new strain of influenza -- is ravaging Oxford, necessitating quarantine, incapacitating the one technician who might be able to bring Kivrin back, and stranding a group of bell-ringers who'd very much like to get to Norwich to ring a Traditional Peal.

The Oxford scenes are at once uncomfortably familiar -- anti-immigrant sentiment, resistance to a lockdown, people so focussed on their own concerns that the gravity of the situation barely registers -- and already alien. A lot of the Oxford half of the plot hinges, as in Blackout / All Clear, on communication issues: a key figure, needed for authorisation purposes, is uncontactable; Dunworthy is expecting several important calls, but can't stay by the phone all the time; one character's reassurance is misunderstood because he uses an Americanism. There's also a vocal minority who believe that the disease came, somehow, from the past -- that it was 'brought back' when Kivrin was sent to the fourteenth century.

But the medieval scenes (though not wholly historically accurate) are still marvellous and frightening. There is a real sense of isolation and deprivation, highlighted by what seems to be the failure of Kivrin's translation device. Willis doesn't shy from describing, in detail, the lingering death from the plague. Kivrin becomes attached to the family who take her in, especially the little girls Agnes and Rosamund: she also forms a bond with the village priest, Father Roche, who believes she is a saint. And she realises that she is stranded a very long way from home.

This was a strangely comforting read, despite the pandemic ravaging the modern world around me. Willis is generally good at characterisation (though I wasn't wholly convinced by 12-year-old Colin, or by some of the more single-minded Oxford individuals) and she knows how to pace a story. The two parallel narratives, Kivrin and Dunworthy, echo and mirror each other throughout: bells ringing, characters trying to communicate with others, over-fond mothers, revelations and reversals. Faith is all very well, but Dunworthy, I think, loses his: he thinks of an empty Heaven, and God unwilling to abandon his only son to suffering. As in Blackout / All Clear, though, love and human decency and care for others triumph over single-mindedness and stupidity.

But I'd have liked more about Kivrin, after.