Customer Reviews

Blackout

5 star:		(63)
4 star:		(43)
3 star:		(43)
2 star:		(36)
1 star:		(45)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Here are a few things worth knowing about Blackout (and the second half, All Clear) before reading:

1. Blackout and All Clear are one book, split in two. Buy both, read Blackout first, and then immediately start in on All Clear.

2. It helps to be familiar with Connie Willis's style and especially her time travel theory before jumping into this 1000 page book. Start with The Doomsday Book and then read To Say Nothing of the Dog.

3. Don't think too hard about the time travel theory. Like every time travel theory, it falls apart under scrutiny. But her theory is quite entertaining and plausible on the surface.

4. In spite of the first chapter of Blackout and the cover flap, this is not a book about Colin Templar. He's in maybe 10% of the book, tops. You'll like the other characters, but not if you're mad that Colin disappears for 800 pages after chapter two.

5. If you're familiar with Connie Willis, you know you just have to roll with the craziness (for a long time with this book, alas) until it gels. This doesn't happen, honestly, until about 250 pages into Blackout. You start with one main character, then jump to another time/place with another main character, then another, and then back to the first, and then to a seemingly-random side story, and then back to the second character, and so on. It's frustrating for a while but it works out and you'll figure out what's going on.

6. The details of this book are the point. You'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about the Blitz. Is it fill? Other than a few (interminable) scenes involving theater rehearsals, it's all pretty interesting.

7. The pacing is a little iffy, especially in the last few chapters, but by then you'll be tearing through it to get the payoff and you probably won't care.

8. The payoff is pretty good. I was up way too late finishing the last 100 pages of this book.

I enjoyed it, just like I've enjoyed Connie Willis's other books (except Passage, ugh). If you're a Connie Willis fan, this is compulsory reading.

I've always loved Connie Willis' books, especially for their lightness and finding the best part of a bad situation. While there is some lightness in Blackout, it's far too choppy in the beginning - it took me until halfway through to not feel lost - so the early humor got lost. Then all the Merope/Eileen humor is focused on really horrible children, who have some sort of ominous role in the book because they cause trouble at so many key points, and I just couldn't find the horrible children amusing. But mostly after putting up with two novellas at full novel prices (Inside Job was at least signed and numbered, All Seated on the Ground was very entertaining), I was really disappointed that the first full length book since Passage was an unfinished story. It is one thing to have stories broken into sections that keep the readers buying more, but Ms. Willis has always written whole books previously, not segments. This was unexpected. Most other serial authors at least tie up the current story to some degree, and leave a couple of key items open to tantalize, but don't just stop abruptly in the middle of a story.

I give it a three because once I got the characters straight and could follow all the story lines, I enjoyed reading it until the abrupt end. The Polly storyline with the folks from the shelter is the best one in my opinion, and I get the feeling that the elder gentleman knows more about time travel than Polly surmises. I'll even buy the next book because I want to know how it ends, and Ms. Willis deserves a second chance.

I'm a big fan of Connie Willis but this book is so poorly conceived that it's maddening at times.

The alternate title should be "The Incompetent Time Travelers". The very first thing a time traveler needs is a suicidal commitment to not changing the past, because changing the past effectively destroys the version of the planet that the traveler came from. Destroying the planet is a big deal. by "suicidal commitment" I mean they must be ready to die rather than change history. In Blackout, the time travelers are historians, but would you rather have a mediocre historian with superb history-preservation skills, or a good historian who is fatally incompetent? Willis' historians are on the fatally incompetent side. In just one example, historian "Mike" -- through a ridiculous chain of events worthy of a sitcom -- ends up on a boat bound for a historical "divergence point". He has a few choices when he discovers this. He can continue on, and probably change history. He can jump off the boat and try to swim back to England, which will probably result in his death, but it's the safest choice. Finally, he can pretend to be sick or cowardly and lie in a bunk belowdecks during the entire event to make sure he doesn't affect anything. This last choice actually occurs to him, but he chooses to actively participate, which is simply insane and incompetent. The other historians make numerous potentially history-changing choices based on their compassion for contemporary characters. I understand it's difficult to suspend one's compassion for fellow human beings, but these people from the time travelers' perspective are long dead, and saving them may be disastrous.

These time travelers have absolutely no emergency procedures whatsoever. Historians go through to the different locations in the same time period without arranging any way to contact each other in case something goes wrong. Even our "heroes" run away from each other and get separated after they finally meet up, and it takes multiple occurrences of this before it finally dawns on them to set someplace to meet. When they're initially looking for each other, it occurs to none of them to place an ad in the newspaper, even though they all read it looking for ads placed by the others. Had none of them ever read the Sherlock Holmes stories, where Holmes routinely used newspaper ads for communication? They run out of money, have no employment, no housing and no food, and nobody thought to simply sew some 5-pound notes into their clothing when they left, or set up a central drop point in each period containing supplies. Finally, and most ridiculous of all, there is no standard way of contacting the future, no procedure to send messages forward. The newspaper could be used for this as well.

I wonder what happened to Connie Willis' characterizations between Doomsday Book and Blackout. In Doomsday Book, a historian ends up stranded during the Black Plague, and just deals with it in a competent manner. In Blackout, the historians get stranded and basically have nervous breakdowns. They even start lying to each other about the situation because at least two of them are close to total mental collapse. It's utterly ironic that this takes place during the perennial Willis setting, London during the Blitz, because the book perfectly illustrates the ability of ordinary Londoners to bear up under the pressure. Is Connie trying to make some kind of lame insinuation that people today (or actually of 2060) are of a lesser caliber? Because the characters from the future, even with full knowledge of the bombing locations and outcome of the war, go completely to pieces while the contemporary Londoners soldier on unfazed.

Structurally, Blackout has some major storytelling flaws. While the world backdrop is Connie's usual rich and detailed tapestry, there are two major issues that her editor really should have helped her with. The first is, that a skilled author creating incredibly annoying children (and several other annoying characters) makes them so real that they annoy the reader to the same degree as a real-world colicky baby in the adjacent airline seat. Why did I have to put up with half a book's worth of Alf and Binnie, children who are so destructive and obnoxious that it's frankly unbelievable, especially in the 1940s, that someone didn't use corporal punishment. This is a time when children being impolite was enough to get them thrashed, and these two miscreants are committing theft, vandalism, arson, and a string of ridiculous disobedience that in real life would have had them locked up in a flash.

The other flaw is that each of the characters goes through the same tedious mental track about why their return time travel "drop" won't open, where their time retrieval-team has gotten to, etc. We are forced to listen to the same line of reasoning, from each of the three main characters, over and over ad nauseum. This could have so easily been avoided with a brief sentence like, "Mike went through the same mental line of reasoning as Merope had, with the same lack of conclusions." We really, really don't need to hear repetitive trains of thought from each character about the same subject.

Each chapter ends with a cliff-hanger as though Willis was writing this as a television screenplay. I kept expecting commercial breaks. And finally, there are a number of ridiculous false alarms which come off on the same level as a hissing cat jumping out of a cupboard in a horror movie.

I don't really blame Willis for most of this, her editor really should have suggested changes which would have greatly improved the book, and with a bit of the nonsense on the cutting-room floor, Blackout and All Clear would have made one really solid book instead of this absurd two-book release which should have been titled "part 1 and 2". These are not two books in the traditional sense where a mini story-arc concludes in each volume, they are literally two volumes of the same book. Blackout ends practically mid-paragraph, and thankfully I was given both books as a gift via Kindle or I would be flaming mad instead of just frustrated and disappointed. Connie can do much better than this, when properly edited.

There are a vast array of opinions on this book, and somehow I think I agree with them all.

I understand that the Willis intended for this book to be a single book with All Clear but that the publishing company wanted two books. They were right. I highly doubt anybody would have gotten through 1,100 pages of this in one go. Where the publishing company fell down was editing. Holy cow!

I've not read All Clear yet, and I do plan to, but I definitely need a little break, even though this book ended with a cliffhanger.

This is my first experience with Willis, so I didn't have any preconceived ideas about what the book would be. I found it clever and a really original way to tell historical fiction. I like the way that she got into the lives of the "contemps" to show what an average person's life was like during WWII. However, I wasn't ever entirely sure I understood the motivation of the "historians" who went back in time to "observe."

I liked the characters, in spite of their sometime denseness, and constantly thinking to themselves, "surely the retrieval team will be here tomorrow."

Speaking of the retrieval team ... I think every author should use the tools available to them in their word processing program. Specifically: "find all". If you input - say - "Retrieval Team" or "The Drop" into this function and find that you have - say - 5,000 of that phrase, you may want to do some editing.

This is where the book suffered. So much repetition. There are 3 primary characters, and all had virtually the same inner monologue and they had it in abundance. I swear there were complete sentences repeated more than once in the book. This lead to a lot of eye-rolling on my part.

What saved this book from the "did not finish" pile, was the fact that I listened to it on audio. The narrator was borderline astounding. There are a lot of characters in this book and a lot of fast-paced dialog. She was outstanding at accents and at pacing and really built suspense. (Though I suspect she too got tired of the phrase "retrieval team.")

Overall, I enjoyed it even though annoyed at times, and I will continue with book 2 as stated above. But good editing really should be insisted upon, and authors who fight it really are doing themselves a disservice.

I loved the setting for this book but hated the plot and characters. This book (and its continuation, "All Clear") was nominated for a Hugo, and I'll certainly be voting against it.

I thought that the background and setting -- England during WWII -- was extremely well done. And on top of that setting, Willis layered a really STUPID story about time travelers. Or maybe I should say, a story about really STUPID time travelers. I have nothing against time travel stories or time travelers per se; it was just that these particular time travelers had maybe four brain cells among them. And they'd be prevented from doing something crucially important because they were too polite to commit minor rudenesses, such as breaking away from a long-winded bore before that person was finished talking.

Most of the time travelers seemed not to understand how time travel worked, and if they'd had any training before being sent 120 years into the past, it was not apparent. Yet the man who runs the time travel program was portrayed as being terribly overprotective. So either a terribly overprotective man sent these people back in time with no training whatsoever, or he sent back people who were too freaking stupid to remember said training. Yet they're all professional historians.

There was a lot of running around in circles to no purpose. I suppose the writer's purpose was to show us that lovely setting she'd so painstakingly concocted. But why have people doing stupid and pointless things on top of that setting? Why not write a story WORTHY of the setting to go on top of it?

Plus, the explanation for it all, at the very end of "All Clear," made no sense. Any of the locals could have done what our time-traveling historians did; they used no special skills or knowledge to do the things they'd done. The story might have made more sense if the historians HAD used some special skills or knowledge that only time travelers would have, but no. I suppose there's some value in the message "Ordinary people can make a difference in the world by doing perfectly ordinary things," but that message doesn't mesh very well with a story about astonishingly stupid time travelers.

Yes, the setting is lovely and very well done, and I'm sure she put tons of research into it. Yes, lovely, Ms. Willis, very nice. But then why did you go on to ruin said setting by putting this lame, juvenile story on top of it?

Connie Willis is capable of writing good books, but this isn't among them.

Not sure why it says it's a review of the paperback; I actually listened to the audiobook.

I've been a big fan of Connie Willis ever since reading Doomsday Book. But this is not her best work, by a long shot. The book suffers greatly from being divided in the middle of the story ("All Clear" finishes the story), a repulsive but increasingly common publishing tactic. I write this review, however, having read both books.

What ultimately makes this a poor book is two things: annoying lead characters and extreme overuse of a few techniques. Her characters are forever being delayed in one way or another, and I imagine she hoped for a comic effect, but I, at least, found it more and more irritating as the book went on. Her characters are supposed to be historians sent into the past -- an intrinsically dangerous thing. Instead of sending bright, emotionally stable people with a set of well thought-through techniques for dealing with emergencies, they choose to send emotional basket cases who are complete ninnies. (To be fair, the book does make it clear that they are sending _students_ as young as 20 -- itself quite a brick to swallow.) I found their behavior increasingly difficult to believe.

Just as annoying is her use of miscommunication. Miscommunication certainly occurs in real life, but the characters populating this tale apparently have their ears filled with wax and their brains made of sawdust; they understand nothing that is said to them, even when the reader inferred it hours ago. The "surprises", such as they are, mostly occur in the second book, but any reasonably attentive reader will have deduced them hours before, and face hours of increasingly inane conversation before getting to the point.

The books are also highly redundant, with conversations being repeated, at times nearly word-for-word, as the scenes are replayed from different points of view in this time-travel tale. I suppose that was intentional, but the books felt rather bloated. They take a long time arriving at nowhere in particular. The author is certainly interested in telling us about the blitz, but the actual story feels pretty thin.

There are good points, in particular her use of "The light of the world". There were many moving passages, and when I was finished with the whole mess I felt as though I'd viewed a movie with great actors but an execrable script. I wanted to know more about at least some of these characters, but in a new production, with the old Connie Willis at the helm. So she hasn't completely lost her touch -- but I would happily have never read these books.

"All Clear" is marginally more satisfactory than "Blackout", but it isn't worth suffering through Blackout to get to it.

I've been looking forward to a new Connie Willis novel for years and years, and I was very happy to finally get Blackout for Christmas. And I must say that I enjoyed reading it. But it just isn't up to the level of her previous time travel stories.

I love Willis's work so much that I'm perfectly willing to cut her some slack. But in this story there's just too much (or correspondingly too little) of a lot of things:

LACK OF HUMOR--Even Willis's most depressing stories usually contain amusing twists. But Blackout seemed...well...darker than usual. Even the "funny stuff" was just too grim.

LACK OF PREPARATION--After the intensive research that Kivrin had to do in order to go back to the Middle Ages in Doomsday Book, I found it appalling that the young historians in Blackout were running around WWII Britain without anything like an adequate broad knowledge of WWII history. (And Dunworthy, who was fanatical about preparation in Doomsday Book, has become downright cavalier about the subject, mixing up drop schedules--with resulting poorer preparation by historians--with no explanation so far.) Eileen/Merope didn't bother to study anything about the Blitz because she was staying the countryside and leaving before it began???? It didn't occur to Polly to just BUY A SKIRT??? It's evident that Colin is better-prepared than any of these students in their 20s. But the most annoying aspect of all this is that Willis seems to have done it purely for the purpose of obfuscation, which is much sloppier than her usual effort.

TOO MANY CHARACTERS--We finally seem to settle down to Mike, Polly, and Eileen/Merope, but we also have chapters with unnamed (or virtually unnamed) characters that seem to have very little to do with the rest of the plot. Considering that Blackout is only the first half of the story, I still have some faith that Willis will pull all this together by the ending. But again, the way it plays out in Blackout seems sloppy and designed purely for obfuscation--to keep the reader from knowing what is going on.

I will reserve further judgment until I've had a chance to read All Clear, but I have to admit that I'm worried.