The more days that pass since my completion of Connie Willis' The Doomsday Book, the less I find that I want to say about it. Was it an enjoyable read? The last 200 pages perhaps. Did I like it, all along its torpid meanderings? No, no I didn't. Maybe that phrase "torpid meanderings" is all that needs to be writ. Maybe I'm concerned that once I get rolling with "some" of what I though about this novel, I'll get carried away reviewing terrain that I'd just as soon be done with.I don't feel like I need to warn of spoilers ahead, since all the information found here is also available on the back cover of the mass-market paperback edition. Along with a pithy comment about "the triumph of the human spirit..." I kid you not. Which may well be my greatest criticism of the text: the novel takes around 400 pages to get to the shocking revelation that we all expected on page one. The endless, tedious buildup to something that we already knew seems more than a little pointless. The characters certainly weren't well developed enough for us to care about their gradual realization of the situation. But I digress...
The Doomsday Book gives you two stories for the price of, well, like five better ones: a near-future narrative of an (*gasp*) influenza epidemic and subsequent government quarantine, and a 14th century narrative dealing with two weeks of, yes, the flu, as well as other more major illnesses encountered by the novel's young protagonist. Time travel has inexplicably been developed in a society that seems remarkably unchanged by and uninterested in the feat. One competing university faction recklessly hurls a 20 year old grad student, alone, into the 1300's. Was I the only person who thought this sounded like risky business, perhaps making it a little difficult to suspend disbelief? No, no I wasn't - in fact we put up with the rheumatic moaning of the novel's best supporting actor (of whom on completing the tome I feel I know little more about than I did in the first chapter) for most of the 300 pages not spent depicting just how banal the 1300's were. We're strung between endless worrying in the 21st century, and endless worrying in the 14th century, with very little action, character development or interesting ideas in between.
I must admit that Willis' account of the black plague was compelling. The final quarter of the novel that actually describes Kivrin's desperate struggle to save the pathetically flawed residents of her village was moving. As was, for me at least, the character of Father Roche: probably my favorite character in the novel. I could have done with much more of this: a fuller, more developed 14th century narrative - fuller development of Kivrin even. Or a shorter novel that poignently told the interesting story. A novel is a frame: the narrative begins and ends at carefully seleted points. Not so here. The text would have benefited from some significant cropping. I could have done with much, much less of unfunny, absurd "comic relief" and pointless, transparent "suspense" in the 21st century.
Maybe I was looking for something that wasn't there... Where was the "big idea?" Was it time travel? Was it that "folks is folks," even in the 14th century? Was it the human cost of epidemic disease? It certainly couldn't have been the painfully superficial musings about God, and bad things happening to good people...
I'm sorry - the Hugo/Nebula vein has provided some truly marvelous reading. It has also exalted some duds. I feel like I could go on with this review, but I'm just really ready to be done with this one...
Final Grade: B-
Re-read? No.
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