Titles (it was a two-part book): Blackout, All Clear
The setting: Oxford, England. Year 2060. Mr. Dunworthy's history department is in chaos. Too many historians are going through the net to too many critical times and places, and everyone's having trouble keeping calm. Wardrobe, research, scheduling, and operations are all flying by the seat of their pants. And a Japanese historian has come up with a set of equations that might prove that time travel is destabilizing everything ... dun dun dunnnnnn.
Main Characters:
Polly Churchill, a World War II specialist whose enthusiasm takes her to London, to work as a shopgirl during the Blitz.
Merope/Eileen, another WWII historian whose first assignment lands her in the country residence of Backbury, serving as a housemaid whose employer is taking in about a dozen evacuated children from London's East End (the dodgy part).
Michael Davies/Mike Davis, traveling to Dover to research unsung heroes and covering as an American reporter.
Colin Templer, who first showed up in Doomsday Book as an incorrigible twelve-year-old with a mania for the Crusades, is now seventeen and desperately in love with Polly—desperate enough to try to convince her that he can use time travel to catch up to her in age, if only she will wait for him.
There are lots of other characters, but I won't mention them because the list would get too long and it would mean major spoilage.
Connie Willis writes like no one else. Other readers have complained that her books could benefit from tighter editing, but oddly enough, I disagree. I feel that just about everything in these books belonged. The suspense got really bad a few times, and because I was reading the second one on Clive, I couldn't skip ahead without losing my place. Aargh.
There were several points where I felt like things dragged, but it was a bit like the forest part in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It just had to be there.
The most beautifully-developed theme of the story didn't become clear until the last page, even though the lead-up was all there. And then it sort of hit me in the head and left me feeling a bit desperate. Like I did when I finished the last book in the Bean series. Like I did when I finished Doomsday Book.
It's funny, because I felt like religious tone of Doomsday Book was intentionally ambiguous, as well as very satirical. It was powerful, but it left me a bit worried about the author and the characters. To Say Nothing of the Dog had no religious message whatsoever. Blackout/All Clear was different. The message was cleaner, and very sweet.
I suppose if I were to find a flaw in the writing, it's that none of the characters have any background. They all take place explicitly in the present (past?), and while they're developed well enough for action heroes, they don't have much depth beyond being intelligent, resourceful, creative, good-hearted people. This has to be a deliberate decision on the part of the author, and it does make sense. Why worry about a character's personal past when the story is about traveling back in time to do research on the past of the entire human race? They have to retain a certain Everyman quality for it to work, I guess, but I do think the characters would be more enjoyable if they had more individuality. In spite of Eileen's fascination with Agatha Christie and the fun nicknames some of the characters came up with for Polly and Mike, the only one who had a personal past was Colin, and that mostly because he was in a previous book.
Additionally, it's obvious that the main characters are just there to be juxtaposed against the "contemps". These books are more historical fiction than they are science fiction. I'm not a particular fan of either one of them as genres, but they work really well together.
