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240 of 277 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Willis' formula is getting tired -- and it's only 1/2 a book, February 27, 2010
This book reminds me of that wonderful joke from Leo Rosten's "The Joys of Yiddish" with which Rosten explained the meaning of "chaloshes" ("something disgusting") -- "The food was a chaloshes - and such small portions!"
I don't know how this book would appear to someone who has never read Connie Willis before. But to someone who has read all of Willis' solo writing, both novels and short stories, and some of her partnered books, it just appears tired. Willis covered the Blitz so movingly in her short stories "Fire Watch" and "Jack," and is capable of creating books that can make you cry ("Doomsday Book") or laugh ("To Say of the Dog" and "Bellwether"), but here manages to be neither moving nor amusing. There is such a host of characters at the beginning, that it's hard to keep them straight. Eventually, we figure out that we are getting the viewpoints of three main characters, historians Polly, Elaine and Mike, all time traveling to WWII England for first person experiences: Polly as a shop clerk in London during the Blitz, Elaine as a maid in the N. of England to observe child evacuees from London, and Mike to Dover to observe ships returning from the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk. But the characters are poorly drawn, and we never get a feel for them. They are just people who know what's going to happen next, and worry incessantly about whether what they've done has changed history. It's hard to illustrate how tiresome this gets without writing spoilers -- suffice it to say that manic thoughts about "but if they'd done X, then that means that they would have missed Y, and then Z couldn't have happened..." etc. etc. from all three characters gets first boring, then downright annoying.
Then there's also Willis' blind spot about telecommunications technology, which has plagued her writing from the beginning, but without which characters would have no excuse for running frantically from one place to another just missing each other and unable to get messages to and from one another. The introductory action is supposed to take place in the year 2060, but not only do people have to run around looking for each other, at one point a character has to put down the receiver to see if another character can come to the phone. A RECEIVER?!?!? In 2060? At least in WWII England, the inability to connect makes some sense, but there's still this sense of everything being oddly frenetic and the characters acting illogically all the time. Not what you'd expect from historians, especially ones approved to go to such a dangerous place and time.
This book is also a major disappointment in how little we care for the "contemps". In "Doomsday Book," when bad things happened to the non-time travelling characters, it was heart-wrenching. Here, it's like "oh... the little girls you thought died in the bombing last night are okay? That's nice." The book is just too emotionally shallow for anything that happens to people to resonate.
And finally, there's the fact that other reviewers have noted, that this and the book's "continuation," "All Clear," which will be published in the fall, were written as one book, but the publisher decided to divide them into two books. So the book just ends, awkwardly, and with no sense of any kind of resolution. There's no cliff-hanger, no closing of one chapter and tantalizing beginning of another... it just ends.
I normally love Connie Willis, and this subject matter is clearly near and dear to her heart, so I was expecting so much more. It's entertaining, and a little bit informative, but it could have and should have been hugely moving and the publisher should have made Willis take out the filler and keep it as one book. As it is, I doubt too many people will come back for part 2.
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32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing, March 21, 2010
This review is from: Blackout (Hardcover)
I should preface this by saying that I am a lifelong fan of time-travel stories. I *loved* THE DOOMSDAY BOOK, and so I was really predisposed to like this one, too.
However....BLACKOUT left me feeling underwhelmed. It is, as others have said, only the first half of the story, and I'm not sure I'm going to bother with the second part when it comes out later this year.
The opening pages set the tone for the whole book. Characters rushing around from one place to another, pages and pages of very tedious explanations of how person A just missed encountering person B, and maybe B's gone off to X, so person A goes chasing after them, only to discover they're actually at Y instead, but "Better hurry because the [wherever they're going] is about to close!" ....which sends A racing off again, in a fruitless and futile search for whoever it is he's trying to find. This sort of situation occurs over and over and over again throughout this book. It got very tiresome after a while.
The sections set in the year 2060 suffer from the same curiously low-tech communications system that was evident in DOOMSDAY BOOK. No cell phones, no answering machines, no Internet, no email. And this is supposed to be 50 years in *our* future? I didn't find it believable.
I liked many of the parts set in WWII-era England. The descriptions of what life was like during the Blitz, what the shelters were like, how people were warned that even lighting a match for a cigarette at night could be enough to draw an enemy bomber....I found all of that very interesting. Ditto the children being evacuated (I didn't know they had housed evacuee children in manor houses, for example). And the Dunkirk storyline was quite interesting, too.
I thought the time-travelers seemed to be far too dependent on their historical research, instead of using common sense. At one point, a character realizes that she needs to learn to drive. So instead of potentially embarrassing herself by not knowing how to open a 1940's car door (!), she goes back to the time portal (the "drop") and returns to the future to get instruction on how to drive a car. What's wrong with simply watching carefully and copying what other people from that time period are doing??
Several of these time-travelers seemed to lack common sense, being much more concerned with trivialities than with observing the people around them (which was, I thought, the point of the time-traveling in the first place). They seem unable to think quickly or cope with the unexpected...hardly desirable qualities in potential time-travelers! (Kivrin, the time-traveler from THE DOOMSDAY BOOK, seems by contrast both far more intelligent and far better prepared to cope with changing circumstances than any of the time-travelers in this book.)
And in the last part of the book, the incessant refrain, "But this was TIME TRAVEL!" became really annoying after a while. The idea was that their rescuers had (literally) "all the time in the world" to find a way to get to the time-travelers stuck in 1940, so why hadn't they come? I couldn't help asking a different question: If the time-travelers had all the time in the world to plan and prepare for their various journeys into the past, why were they in such an ungodly hurry in the beginning of the book, rushed into assignments without sufficient preparation, etc? It didn't make any sense to me, except as a way to set up the plot.
All in all, I have to say I was disappointed with this book. I really wanted to like it, but in the end, the negatives outweighed the positives. The book ended with a cliffhanger, but not one that's powerful or interesting enough to make me eager to read part 2 of the story.
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67 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WWII As Seen by Everyman and Everywoman, February 5, 2010
This review is from: Blackout (Hardcover)
We are losing the people who fought and lived through WWII both on the front and the homefront and with this loss, we are losing the vital importance of that war to the world we live in now; it could all be very, very different. As Mary Doria Russell put it, WWII is that war "which began years before it began and has never quite ended and which provides the pivot point for two centuries."
In Blackout, Connie Willis returns to the time travel universe in Oxford made popular by Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, but this time she takes us to WWII England with three historians, one observing the evacuation of Dunkirk from Dover, one observing the thousands of children evacuated to rural England and one working as a shop girl during the Blitz. Willis's research is remarkable and never overbearing; we learn facts about the Blitz and Dunkirk without ever feeling that this has turned from a novel to a dry recitation. And what facts they are! It was vital that the Allied powers win WWII and everything that we and our children know is because this in fact happened, but there were many points at which it might not have happened the way history has it.
Willis's time-traveling historians have a lot to contend with, not only the hardships of living as 'contemps' in WWII England, but the fear, becoming more and more pressing as the novel progresses, that their mechanism of time-travel has gone disastrously awry, stranding them in WWII England forever, but even more importantly, allowing them to change the course of history, perhaps to the detriment of the Allies and every person on earth. Before the events of the novel, it was a law of time travel that a traveling historian couldn't change the events of the past, but one of the historians rescues people at Dunkirk, a time-point previously inaccessible for that very reason. The book ends with the three protagonists stranded and a fourth, as yet un-named arriving just as the book ends. Careful readers of this and other Willis books in the same universe will have their guesses as to who this traveler is. The cliff-hanger is not as annoying as other reviewers would have it.
In showing us WWII, Willis has given us a more somber version of her time-travel universe; in this book, even more than in The Doomsday Book, what the time-travelers do matters. But Willis's story is also of the everyday people who affected these events and whose sacrifices allow all of us to live as we do. Willis doesn't dwell on this, and instead she chooses to dwell on the heroic in daily life, but between every line is the knowledge of how many people's blood washed the earth to allow a victory in WWII. It is an affecting reading experience and though I miss her trademark screwball comedy of manners, it wouldn't be appropriate here.
In short, Willis is reminding us of the WWII that we can never forget, but she is also reminding us of the immense potential for good and sacrifice and nobility that lives in each of us, no matter how ordinary.
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