For Kivrin, preparing for on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of he fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be retrieved. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin - barely of age herself - finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.
I just want to start off by saying that writing this up, I accidentally wrote "Boomsday Book" instead, which I wish was a real book, filled with people saying things like, "This! Is my boomstick!" and generally being a lot more lighthearted than Doomsday Book. Not that I didn't enjoy Doomsday Book. Just that it was not lighthearted. And didn't contain popular characters from the Evil Dead movies. Well, nobody's perfect.
The book's title is a play on words, from the ancient English survey record spelled "Domesday Book", but which was at the time it was written (1086 a.d.), in my abbreviated understanding, pronounced "doomsday". The book is the first in what became Willis' most well-known world: sometime in the twenty-first century, historians use time travel to do research in the location and time of the actual events, which is pretty much the awesomest idea ever. Here, Kivrin gets sent off to the 1300s, a century which an incompetent adminstrator has only just deemed safe enough to explore. A series of extremely unlikely events combine to prevent Kivrin and the people waiting anxiously for her return (namely her advisor and father-figure of sorts Dunworthy) from being reunited.
I like this book, I really do. But it is a loooong book. Too long. Often, I found myself skipping descriptions and minor character chatter because it was repetitive and senseless. Which is Willis' point (and trademark), to some extent: people are idiots, and always looking for someone else to blame. But Doomsday could easily have been cut by a hundred pages. Things go pretty quickly in the beginning, and at light-speed in the end (especially when Dunworthy winds up unconscious for more than a week and a somewhat major character gets sick and dies off-screen. What, what!) but the middle drags. In fact, just about all of book two (which in my version is 259 pages out of the book's 578 total, a whopping 45%) drags. There's a lot of hand-wringing in the twenty-first century, and, as others have pointed out, the reveal at the end of book two is something we all see coming a mile away, or 259 pages ago.
Willis tends to write screwball comedies, which she does well, but it's very much out of place here. The tone of the book is really not appropriate for it, since you're following along on the whimsical plot of the rationed toilet paper and then --BAM! People start dying left and right. Whiplash much? She only uses it for the twenty-first century parts, which is a relief, since I doubt very much that the fourteenth century resembled a screwball comedy, especially when people began dying of *Spoiler!* the black plaaaaaaaaague! Or here, the "blue sickness," as they call it poetically. Yeeeeeeah, you're still gonna vomit up blood and grow buboes with that. (NB: Buboes! Best word ever, y/y? But a word to the wise, do not, repeat, do not google image it)
Once you get past all the highly improbably coincidences (a terrible strain of influenza was released from a seven hundred year old tomb, that managed to infect Kivrin and the tech putting in her coordinates, for starters) the historical part is pretty interesting. No doubt it is completely made up out of whole cloth, since the records for this period are slim pickin's, but Doomsday's a fascinating take on how we interpret and create a story for the past, which can bear little or no resemblance to the real thing. Or, to put it another way, it is Motel of the Mysteries, but for the Middle Ages, rather than the 1980s.
Although I skimmed the modern (or, okay, "futuristic", even though it sounds about as futuristic as 1994) parts, I did enjoy the historical parts. The story of the family Kivrin falls in with is interesting, although I was a bit frustrated with her sometimes completely thoughtless actions, given that she was supposed to be able to blend in with the "contemps". Especially when everyone in the twenty-first century seemed to assume that not blending in would lead to a swift burning at the stake. Well if you believed that, Kivrin, why did you try and chat up Gawyn by his lonesome, you hussy? In fact, no one in the Middle Ages even approaches the suggestion of burning Kivrin at the stake, which is almost a let down, especially after she does a whole bunch of incredibly suspicious, time-period unfriendly things whilst trying to get information about the rendezvous point out of her host family.
As I said earlier, book three goes lightening fast, both as the plague gathers momentum in the village, and as Dunworthy and crew finally realize that Kivrin is stuck in 1348 and they scramble for a way to get her out. The ending is super bittersweet, which is why I don't enjoy this as much as some of Willis' other works, but also uplifting in some ways, as the priest of the village gives to the utmost, even as he puts himself at risk for catching the disease. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Kivrin does get rescued in the end (Willis is not that dark, y'all), but can anyone say PTSD? I mean, she pretty much got to watch as everyone she had bonded with died horribly of a disease that Kivrin knew all about but couldn't cure, and that she herself was immune to. And then she got to bury all of them. I don't know about you, but gosh darn if that wouldn't put me off of time travel for a good long while. Also, talk about unsafe working conditions. I'm sure OSHA wouldn't approve.
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