Blackout - Connie Willis
2016 July 14
I love these books so much. Stories about women in wartime are catnip to me. But this book, in which the daily struggle to keep calm and carry on is so hard for Britons: it gives me all the feels, but also hope for humanity.
2013 January 1
2010 March 14<br/><br/>It was everything I could do not to start this so far ahead of its proper turn in the stack. Just saying.<br/><br/>***<br/><br/>My, what a big book. But such an enormous pleasure. Much of the time, after turning the last page on a 500 page book, and discovering a note saying: hey, you'll have to read the next book to find out what happens, I'd be slightly vexed. Here, the only disappointment is that I'll have to wait six months.<br/><br/>Willis uses the device of time-travel so effectively, she's made it her own. It enables her to address modern sensibilities and issues, as well as to enter into the mindset of a given period. In fact, time travel exists in order to permit her characters to really understand a time, and the people who lived through it, as fully human. The historians start out with some information, but with a great deal of distance. She won't let them leave until they really become an active part of the time they're visiting.<br/><br/>In this book she sends historians back to Britain in WWII. One guy is a jerk, the other isn't, the gals are pretty nearly indistinguishable. But trapped in their assignments they become Britons fighting the war, and they become distinct individuals as well.<br/><br/>I've said before that Willis is the master of writing bureaucratic muddle. She can turn it to comic effect, as in [book:To Say Nothing of the Dog|6357894], or she can use it to heighten the drama and add poignancy, as in [book:Passage|7402459]. Here, she does both. And the net effect is to take the accounts of survivors and pull them together into an engrossing and coherent narrative. Blackout, together with All Clear, is going to be one of the most memorable novels of WWII that I've ever read.
