Blackout / All Clear

I first heard Connie Willis reading pieces of what would become Blackout in the spring of 2002. It was one of the books I wanted to read on our fall vacation in Whistler back in 2010 shortly after it was published.  It might not have affected me as it did had I not spent the entire preceding week immersed in capturing my father’s memories of WWII as an Air Corps officer. To read her retelling (in part) of the stories of Londoners in the Blitz, of the guys who built a fake Army to convince the Germans the invasion was coming at Calais, of the ambulance drivers and air raid wardens and rescue workers is all pretty amazing. I timed reading Blackout carefully, knowing that it was only half the story, and that if I got sucked in at the cliffhanger, I'd only have to wait a few weeks for the second half, All Clear, to appear. I was and I did.

     Basically, a flock of time-travelling Oxford historians (see Willis' Hugo-winning "Fire Watch", et sequelae) are visiting Britain during the War. Things, of course, go wrong --- including the whole of the events in the "Fire Watch" taking place under their noses. Oxford don Mr Dunworthy traipses back into the past in an attempt to help and finds himself trapped, too. There was a point in the middle where I was getting frustrated with Willis for dragging us through day after day of the uncertainty of our time travellers dealing with the uncertainty of the Blitz. But then I realized: this is what it must have been like. Not just the uncertainty of the time-travelling historians, but the uncertainty of day-to-day life for Londoners in the Blitz, for everyone in southern England during the V-1 and V-2 attacks, for everyone while the threat of invasion was high. She manages to weave in the central mystery of why things are going wrong, with some surprising results. I blasted through the back half of All Clear on a Sunday afternoon, and when I was done and tears were streaming down my face, my first reaction was "How the hell did she do that!?" and my second was "I'm glad she did."