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Doomsday Book

Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book combines science fiction and historical fiction in a time travel drama, with academia and the plague. It’s overall a warm story, powered by friendship and affection, but also asking heavier questions about duty, responsibility to others, and loss.

Just before Christmas in 2054, Kivrin Engle convinces the authorities running Oxford’s medieval research time travel program to send her to 1320, a century previously deemed too dangerous. But Gilchrist, the ambitious head of one college, overrules concerns to recategorize the century as safe and permit Kivrin’s trip, while their highest boss is away on Christmas break. If Professor Gilchrist and Kivrin are right, she’ll return with brilliant research and make his career — both of their careers, really. It’s the academic infighting and the scene of friends snarkily watching endless speeches before the launch that really grounds the dramatic time travel story.

Before the trip, Kivrin’s done extensive preparation for her trip by studying languages and customs, learning useful skills like embroidery and milking a cow. She’s gotten her time-travel jabs, and she’s even broken her fingernails and scratched up her hands for the authentic farm-chores look. She hopes to discover more about daily life in 1320, and she also wonders about wider, more human questions about how average people coped with high mortality. I was reminded of the passive acceptance in Down the Common, an account of one year of medieval peasant life, and the online discussion from readers about how accurate that might be to real medieval life. I enjoyed moments when Kivrin was trying to survive, trying to keep her cover story intact, trying to make her way back to the drop to return safely, but she was also noting details of daily medieval life for her future research.

Professor Dunworthy, though, is afraid that too much can go wrong and that both Kivrin and Gilchrist are too optimistic, for different reasons. It’s not the time-travel that can go wrong, since the future tech automatically avoids paradoxes. If a visiting historian’s arrival will upset a key event, their arrival slips a few minutes forward or back, avoiding any paradoxes or alternate histories. The tech won’t allow historians to bring anything back from the past, either, and the Oxford researchers only travel back with historically-accurate outfits and possessions. So no one’s looting old temples for treasure or dazzling the peasants with a pocket flashlight or anything. Doomsday Book is a time travel book, but without the usual wibbly-wobbly time-travel stress. The plot never worries about someone saying the wrong thing or leaving something behind and accidentally rewriting history.

Even so, there are high stakes and dangers in visiting the middle ages. There’s a bit of fatalistic prep involved in Kivrin’s travel. Kivrin has decided that if she can’t survive and can’t make it back to the drop to return to the present day, she’ll try to be buried in a village where a single-minded American professor, Montoya, is now working on a dig. Montoya is such a fun character, the disconnected professor archetype, who remains completely focused on her excavation through the epidemic, the infighting, and all the dangers. At one point, she’s videocalling Dunworthy, while flipping through a grave and looking for evidence of Kivren’s long-deceased body. Montoya also serves to highlight Dunworthy and Dr Mary Ahern’s friendship. Montoya doesn’t suffer the grief that Dunworthy does in this novel, because she’s not close enough to anyone to experience loss. One of the central questions the book asks is about grief and loss, as modern historians consider if long-ago people in periods of high mortality felt loss like we do, or if they built up emotional defenses and felt less than modern people do. In both timelines, the book considers loss and grief, and how that can change characters.

Despite her careful plans and cover story, when she arrives in the past, Kivrin immediately falls ill and spends her first few days disoriented with high fever. (The author is just way too good at evoking that high-fever confusion, by the way.) In both timelines, all their careful planning is upset by a bad flu, which is wonderfully relatable and grounds some of the wilder parts of the story because it’s just so human and familiar. Who hasn’t gotten sick and missed something they really wanted to do? Who hasn’t struggled through an important work day when they weren’t feeling well?

Characters try to make the best decisions they can, even if that leads to spreading disease. In modern Oxford, one guy coming to work a bit under the weather sets both Kivrin’s troubles and the flu epidemic in motion. (Or can we blame the start of it all on Professor Montoya’s devotion to her dig?) Meanwhile, their medieval counterparts try to flee from the plague, often spreading it more. I was reminded of Year of Wonders, a novel inspired by the historical story of the village of Eyam, who quarantined themselves in to stop the spread of the plague. But even in advanced Oxford, there’s an anxious feeling of randomness in the spread of disease, and a real wonder if knowing everything we know — about disease, time-travel, history, etc. — is enough to keep each other safe.

Doomsday Book was published in 1992, and the modern Oxford is set in in 2054, but I’m reading it in 2024, so it took me a moment to realize the pandemic that the modern Oxford characters reference living through wasn’t the real coronavirus pandemic, but a fictional deadly flu. These are fictional toilet paper shortages and fictional religious exceptions to the fictional vaccines, and fictional protests demanding Britain leave the fictional version of the EU. It’s always fun to read what older scifi authors imagined we’d have in the wild future of the 2000s, isn’t it? Reading accounts of a fictional pandemic, that was written pre-pandemic and read post-pandemic also gives a strange feeling of time branching off in different ways.

Doomsday Book focuses on relationships and affection, without having a romantic plot, and I just loved that. I’m 100% here for a story about friendship and duty, and I loved reading about the affection and warm respect between colleagues, between teacher and student, between auntie and nephew, etc. etc. These relationships power the story: Dunworthy’s desire to protect Kivrin, Kivrin’s affection for the daughters of the house, Father Roche’s respect and duty to his community, even the disease and the displacement starts because Badri doesn’t want to let his team down.

This was such a great read, blending so many elements I like into one completely compelling story.

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Steve Tracey says:

December 16, 2024 at 10:49 am

Thanks for the reminder of a book I enjoyed so long ago I seem to have read it in a different time line. It's always interesting to see the future from the perspective of the past. With the wibbly-wobbly time-travel stress ironed out of course.
- Meg says:
  
  December 16, 2024 at 11:06 am
  
  Have you read the second one "To Say Nothing of The Dog" too? I just requested it from the library.