Minimalist Story-telling

[mtvessel]

May 2024
Doomsday Book - Connie Willis – Gollancz, 2012
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The author, as I have remarked before, has a writing style similar to minimalism in modern music, by which I mean that her characters find themselves circling in repetitive situations as the plot slowly develops. This is also true of her shared world of books featuring time-travelling Oxford academics, which repeat tropes (researchers getting trapped in the past) and characters (such as Professor Dunworthy) from book to book, whilst doing something different each time thanks to the varying historical periods visited and the theme that each book has. This one is the first of the full length novels set in this world, and has the advantage of freshness as a result.

It helps that the cast of characters is relatively small. Kivrin is a researcher who is sent back to thirteenth century Oxfordshire, despite her tutor James Dunworthy's worries for her safety and the attempts of his rival, the overbearing and insufferable Professor Gilchrist, to take control. But Badri, the technician, falls ill and goes into a coma after a cryptic warning that something is wrong, and Kivrin finds herself in a wintry Oxfordshire landscape that is stranger than she anticipated.

I think that's all that can safely be said about the plot without major spoilers, but suffice to say that disease and death are major themes, leavened by some broadly comic side characters including a group of American church bell ringers, a student lothario and his overly protective mother, and a pert kid called Colin, all of whom act as distractions to the harassed Professor Dunworthy as he tries to figure out what has happened. The contrast between their trivial concerns and the deadly situations that Kivrin and Badri are in is played for laughs, but also lays the foundations for the more serious scenes later on in the book, where the gloves come off and the tone darkens into a brutally realistic and bleak portrayal of an unfolding disaster. This may sound off-putting, but Willis' style, with its frequent returns to characters you have got to know, draws you in.

It has to be said that Willis' future Oxford, which gets more of an outing in this book than in her later ones, is somewhat lacking in futurology - there are a few token nods to high tech wizardry, such as bullet trains and a tube service (presumably an extension of the London Underground), but people still communicate by landline and paper and speak in 1980s English. However this is less of a problem than it might be in another setting thanks to the timeless nature of Oxford's colleges (though sadly not its shops). And the story absolutely holds up, with some clever links between past and present and its firm determination to demonstrate that compassion and caring are the marks of true heroes. Which is another of Willis' repeating tropes, and one I am very glad of.