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In Blackout, award-winning author Connie Willis returned to the time-traveling future of 2060—the setting for several of her most celebrated works—and sent three Oxford historians to World War II Eng;and: Michael Davies, intent on observing heroism during the Miracle of Dunkirk; Merope Ward, studying children evacuated from London; and Polly Churchill, posing as a shopgirl in the middle of the Blitz. But when the three become unexpectedly trapped in 1940, they struggle not only to find their way home but to survive as Hitler’s bombers attempt to pummel London into submission. Now the situation has grown even more dire. Small discrepancies in the historical record seem to indicate that one or all of them have somehow affected the past, changing the outcome of the war. The belief that the past can be observed but never altered has always been a core belief of time-travel theory—but suddenly it seems that the theory is horribly, tragically wrong. Meanwhile, in 2060 Oxford, the historians’ supervisor, Mr. Dunworthy, and seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who nurses a powerful crush on Polly, are engaged in a frantic and seemingly impossible struggle of their own—to find three missing needles in the haystack of history. Told with compassion, humor, and an artistry both uplifting and devastating, All Clear is more than just the triumphant culmination of the adventure that began with Blackout. It’s Connie Willis’s most humane, heartfelt novel yet—a clear-eyed celebration of faith, love, and the quiet, ordinary acts of heroism and sacrifice too often overlooked by history.
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Oh, man, Connie Willis, you heartbreaker. At least more animals and children survived this one than in [b:Doomsday Book|24983|Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel #1)|Connie Willis|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1403972500s/24983.jpg|2439628].
Spoilers and tragedies aside, yes, okay, I agree, this duo of books could use some significant editing - the middle section (or rather, end of Blackout/beginning of All Clear) goes on raaaather a long time with the "did we change history? But we can't change history, cause it's in the past. BUT DID WE THOUGH" angst. This kind of repetitiveness is a recurring theme with Willis's books - but I enjoy her writing enough to simply not mind the superfluity, because it means I get more pages to spend with these characters. There's always a point to the loop of repeating patterns, and that's true in Blackout/All Clear as well - but we would probably have gotten the point with a chapter or two less of it.
Willis's depth of historical detail is glorious, and at the story's end, I'm left feeling like Eileen, standing in Trafalgar Square on VE-Day, realizing that viewing the celebration as an outsider observer, an historian, would not have let her really understand it - that you have to live through all the years of blackout and Blitz, the unending months of terror and sudden, unspeakable violence, and the stiff upper lips and dauntless courage and strength and hopefulness of the "contemps" to truly grokk the significance of the moment when the lights go on again all over the world.
Heroism, optimism, sacrifice, writ small, yet enormous. As always - sense of urgency, engaging characters, intricate and clever plotting, and sublime, moving prose.
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