Doomsday Book
by Connie Willis
I confess (I seem to confess a lot in these pages) that I came to Doomsday Book as a non-fan of Connie Willis. I'd found some of her other work so dreary it didn't repay reading, and I'd taken positive offense at some blurb comparing her to P.G. Wodehouse.
As a result, I picked up this book when it was no longer new (published in 1992) and when one of its themes was less than fresh. I began reluctantly and spent some time annoyed with the style. A quarter or a third of the way in, however, I found that Willis had hooked me, and from there on I read with enjoyment.
In our future, you do historical research by traveling to the time that interests you. While the technique is routine, it costs a lot, and your department can only afford to send you if you can procure a grant. Once you say the word "grant" you've opened up a big can o' worms: academic politics, books of procedures, administrative hitches, people who don't return phone calls.
Our heroine wants to link firsthand observations with some finds at a medieval village being dug near Oxford, particularly a tomb dated to around 1320. She gets her grant, takes her shots, studies the language of the place and time (as reconstructed by the faculty), and passes through the machine just as a new virus starts to spread in Oxford.
If I could distill the plot for you, you wouldn't thank me. Willis goes big: She was after all writing in '92 when all the world was facing a plague, or rather when the nations were deciding how they would respond to one. (By the way, has anyone heard how that came out?)
I believe that no one can understand the answer to a question till they have asked the question, and that no one really credits a story unless it bears on a person they know. Connie Willis may believe so too, for her heroine does ask questions (even if answers come only after a long wait—maybe as much as 800 years), and she sets her reader in a village where everybody knows everybody else. How does a 21st-century nation react to an epidemic when, by definition, all the "easy" diseases have been settled? How does a 14th-century town react to one when there are not yet any easy diseases?
Willis takes the time to make you know the people in Oxford, those who work the time machine and those who treat the sick, and the people in the little village, those who have property and those who must scratch out their living. When an epidemic strikes the modern city, the victims have names and reasons for living; when another strikes the settlement, it takes people with names and breaks into social and even family groups. Doomsday Book is not, like its 11th-century namesake, about statistics. The people of 1992 got a lot of statistics, plenty of statistics, from their newspaper; this book provides none at all, only stories about one person at a time making a mistake or just drawing the short straw.
The virus in Oxford and the plague in Ashencote are not judgments, merely illnesses, and so is the one that many readers will connect with this book. Even a decade later, it's worth reading.
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Doomsday Book