I read the All Clear duology four years ago and only just recently got around to reading Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis, which is actually a prequel to All Clear, so I’m not sure why my brother recommended I read All Clear first. Maybe he just like All Clear better, so he raved about it to a point where I finally read it.
I enjoyed it so much that I was excited to read this book, but as so often happens, there are just too many books and too little time for me to read everything I want to read. Then I decided that this year I would read and return all the books that have been loaned to me over the years, which prompted me to finally pick up this book and read it.
It’s every bit as enjoyable as All Clear, although because it had been so long between when I read All Clear and when I read this book, I had forgotten who most of the characters were. I think I vaguely remembered Mr. Dunworthy, and Colin’s name seemed to ring a bell, but in All Clear, he’s working as a member of the team, where as in Doomsday Book, he’s still a student who’s merely visiting Oxford for Christmas break.
This book is about sending a young girl (I think she’s in her 20s) to 1320 Oxford. She’s all excited, but Mr. Dunworthy is vehemently opposed to the whole thing because they weren’t called the Dark Ages for nothing, especially for single women wandering around alone. Also, time travel is still fairly new and not very well understood. So far, they’ve only sent people back to the 20th and 19th centuries, and it seems like the farther back you go, the more slippage you experience. Slippage is when you try to send someone back to a certain date and time, but they end up arriving at a later time, or even a later date, because Time will go “Nope, can’t do that. Let’s put you over here instead.”
In addition to the Dark Ages being incredibly dangerous all on their own, Mr. Dunworthy has absolutely no faith that the Medieval Department has any idea what it’s doing. Mr. Gilchrist, the head of the Medieval Department, has no idea how time travel works and doesn’t even bother to do a perimeter check before sending their historian (Kivrin) back to the past. A perimeter check is where you make sure the “net”, as they call it, opens at the physical place they expect it to open, so they actually know where their historian is going, as well as when.
The idea is to drop Kivrin off near the road to Oxford with a broken cart and some minor wounds so she can claim she was set upon by robbers and hope the first person to find her is a good Samaritan, rather than an actual robber/rapist/murderer. They come up with a fake name for her, as well as a story to explain why she’s traveling on her own as a young noblewoman (she’s visiting her sick brother and her servants all fled when the robbers attacked).
Along with worrying about everything else, Mr. Dunworthy is terrified that Kivrin will die of the Black Plague, even though it didn’t arrive in Oxford until 1348, but, again, he has 0 faith in the Medieval Department. Also, Kivrin got vaccinated against the plague, so even if she does encounter it, she should still be safe, so Mr. Dunworthy should just stop worrying, as everyone keeps telling him.
Except, of course he was right to worry because there wouldn’t be a book if things didn’t go horribly, horribly wrong.
Kivrin does manage to get rescued by a good Samaritan and taken to the local manor house, but she is so ill during her travels back through time that she’s delirious for most of her first days in the fourteenth century, so she doesn’t know where the drop is, and she’s not even sure what town she’s in. To make matters worse, her translator’s not working right. She went so far back in time that the English language is almost completely unrecognizable from what it is now, so they embedded a translator in her brain that’s supposed to translate for her everything she hears, and should allow her to think what she wants to say and tell her how to pronounce it so the “contemps” can understand her. Except, as it turns out, the historians who taught her to speak ancient English had no idea how it was pronounced so they taught her all wrong. Eventually, the translator does catch up and she’s able to communicate with the people around her, but it’s a close call because a woman wandering alone speaking in tongues could very easily end up at the stake in the fourteenth century, or at the very least, hanged as a spy for a foreign government. Fortunately for Kivrin, they just chalk it up to her head injury when she was accosted by robbers.
Meanwhile, back in 2054, a pandemic hits as soon as Kivrin goes back in time. Badri, the tech who was supposed to check that everything went well with Kivrin’s drop, finds Mr. Dunworthy in a pub shortly after completing the drop, tells him something’s wrong, brings him back to the lab, and promptly passes out before he can tell Mr. Dunworthy what’s wrong. Now Mr. Dunworthy is extra worried about Kivrin because he knows something’s wrong with the drop, but he doesn’t know what. In addition, he’s worried about Badri who has to be taken to the hospital and is delirious for most of the next two weeks.
Other people start getting sick, and while the doctors are trying to figure out where the disease came from, Mr. Gilchrist is convinced the disease came from the past (because he has no idea how time travel works, no matter how many times Mr. Dunworthy tries to explain it to him), so he refuses to open the drop to allow Kivrin to come back to 2054 until they have identified the disease, even if it means abandoning her in the fourteenth century altogether.
Meanwhile, once she feels well enough to travel, Kivrin is desperately trying to find the man she thinks rescued her in the woods so she can ask him where the drop is, but men and women aren’t supposed to speak alone, so it’s really hard for her to corner the guy. A couple times she tries to explore the woods to see if anything looks familiar, but quickly realizes the woods are way too big for her to find her way on her own, and a lot of snow has fallen since she arrived, covering any tracks she left.
The family Kivrin is staying with consists of the lady of the house, Eliwys, her two daughters, Agnes and Rosemund, and her mother-in-law, Lady Imeyne. The Lord is away on some business dealing with a trial and has sent his family to their country house and told them not to tell anyone where they are.
Unfortunately, his mother is an idiot and invites the local bishop and his party to celebrate Christmas with them. Lady Imeyne tries to get the bishop to take Kivrin back to his nunnery, assuming she must be a nun, since she accidentally lets slip that she can read Latin, but the bishop says he doesn’t have time, has urgent business, and he rushes off with everyone except his clerk. He says his clerk is hung over and to let him sober up and then send him after them, but it turns out that, although he did have a lot to drink the day before, he actually has the plague and that’s when Kivrin finally asks what year it is. It’s not 1320 at all, but 1348.
Of course, the “contemps” had no idea how infection worked, so Kivrin is desperately trying to keep everyone in the house away from the clerk while she nurses him. Although she’s been vaccinated against it, she still takes precautions when she’s around the clerk, covering her mouth and trying to touch him as little as possible.
Despite her best efforts, everyone in the household comes down with it and eventually dies. To make matters worse, the local priest kicks her when he’s delirious and doesn’t know what he’s doing. He manages to break her ribs.
Kivrin misses the drop because she’s so busy trying to nurse everyone back to health and protect them from the plague that she completely loses track of the days. She has no idea where the drop is anyway, so even if she knew what day it was, she couldn’t make her way back to the drop.
Meanwhile, in the process of collecting data so they can identify the source of the disease and convince Mr. Gilchrist it didn’t come from the past so he’ll open the drop, Mr. Dunworthy comes down with whatever’s going around, ends up in the hospital, and doesn’t come back to himself until after the date of the drop.
Fortunately, once Mr. Dunworthy is back to his old self (more or less), Colin convinces him not to give up on Kivrin. They hatch an escape plan to get him and Badri (who’s still weak, but mostly recovered) out of the hospital and back to the lab so they can open up the drop and go rescue Kivrin. They only have about 24 hours to keep the drop open, and a lot of ground to cover, but against all odds, they manage to find Kivrin and bring her back to the drop.
I have to admit, for a while there I was worried that Kivrin was just going to be stuck in 1348 and they were never going to manage to bring her back, but they manage it.
I found it amusing how many things Willis got right and the things she got wrong about the 21st century. She nailed our reaction to a pandemic (specifically, Americans’ reactions), and while she correctly theorized that phones would all have screens on them so we could see each other while talking, she failed to take cell phones into account.
On the whole, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I hope it doesn’t take me another four years to get back to this series.