Reading Well: Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

Blackout and All Clear (both published in 2010) by Connie Willis are really one story, but each book is sizable (400 pages plus), so I can see how publishing them as a duology made sense. The core premise of the novel is a future where graduate students in history-related disciplines are now able to travel back in time (subject to some limitations and some imprecision in the exact time, and place of their arrival), providing first-person observations of past events. Our main characters are all studying WWII, and are placed around the European theater, mostly in England.

The novels straddle two genres, time-travel and historical fiction, and is more successful on the latter than the former, so let’s start there.

The research and historical granularity is fantastic: this is one of those works of fiction that ends up educating in illuminating ways, adding greatly to the reader’s sense of what WWII “might have been like.” Willis does a good job of weaving the role of foresight into the narrative: the historians know what area of London is going to be bombed heavily over the next days, but they need to act on that knowledge while camouflaging their behavior.

And this gets into a core time-travel conundrum: what is the impact on the past of any change to the past, even that of observation? This is an ongoing concern in the book, but it feels more like a narrative device than a tangible risk; certainly it seems less immediate than the bombs and the bullets. Despite their repeated anxiety, there never seems to be the true threat of a Man in the High Castle outcome, where the graduate students’ behavior leads to a German victory.

I haven’t mentioned the characters because they blended together quite significantly for me: there were affections and animosities, a love affair or two, but what kept me reading to the end of the second book was the history and the details of how different narratives in WWII threaded together by the end. Even knowing “how it all turned out,” it remained a page turner, as the amount of damage and devastation meant, even if England’s victory was historically assured, the fates of the individuals never were.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Historical veracity. I am in awe of research, and of finding ways to fit a narrative to what actually happened, without being inevitably drawn into plot twists that deviate from the research in significant ways.