Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis
27 February, 2015
After racing through both Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, I was keen to return to Connie Willis’ world, Oxford circa 2065, mixed with time travel back to the Blitz. As much as I enjoyed the light tone of To Say Nothing of the Dog, I was hoping that Blackout and All Clear would be closer to the darker, sombre and menacing mood in Doomsday Book. And it was and so much more.
Blackout and All Clear are two parts of one grand novel and so I will discuss them together. Set seven years after Doomsday book, we are once again reunited with Dr. Dunworthy, his team at Balliol College and Colin Templar who was just a boy in the earlier novel. Colin is now in his final year at school and preparing to get into Oxford to study under Dunworthy, his dream of time-traveling still unabated and perhaps stoked a little by his crush on Dunworthy’s student Polly who is sent back to 1940s London together with fellow history students Merope and Michael in order to complete their finals. All are armed with their required survival skills and knowledge including a list of crisis points and bombing schedules to keep them safe. Polly will be arriving in London to work as a shop girl, Merope as a maid in a country house to study evacuees and Michael, armed with an American accent to pass muster as a journalist, to study local heroes.
Everything goes smoothly for Merope who has been working for a couple of months looking after children from the East End, but as soon as Polly and Michael appear, things start to go wrong. Due to the build up of slippage, they arrive at different coordinates and time which means they are stranded. But confident in the information they possess, they try to get to where they are meant to be, looking for work and their contacts. And so begins their quest for survival as they slowly realise that their team in Oxford have no idea where or when they are when they fail to rendezvous and report back to their lab. There is no way back except to pray that Dunworthy will come to save them in time. For the clock is ticking and the list of expected bombing dates is only as long as their carefully planned stay. In the meantime, Merope finds herself in charge of two East End tearaways, Michael finds himself in Dunkirk, the last place he expected to be and one which should have been impossible as it is a major crisis point, and Polly finds herself drawn into an amateur acting troupe in her local shelter.
Both Blackout and All Clear are all about the race against time. Will Merope, Polly and Michael manage to find each other? And even if they do, will they be able to send messages back into the future for Mr. Dunworthy to mount a rescue operation? As the days pass and the dangers increase, Polly can only pray that Colin will do as he has promised; that he will come and find her wherever she is.
Willis has really outdone herself here. Apart from conjuring up how it must have felt like to be alive during this time, the constant fear, unexpected camaraderie and kindnesses, the resilience of the common people which broke through the class barrier which is reminiscent of Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch in its depiction of London, she has also built this into an intricate plot with time travel, parallel timelines and history assignments. For the one cardinal rule of time-travel is that you can go back as many times as you like except you can’t inhabit the same time and place twice. There is a deadline and one of the students is in danger unless they can get out in time.
I keep saying this again and again; Willis has created a credible and vibrant universe, not so different from our own in which time-travel exists with all its paradoxes and problems of slippage. Her time-travel theories are in themselves fascinating but it is her story-telling and characters which will remain with you long after you finish reading her novels. It’s difficult to do her novels justice when trying to describe them, her plots are intricate and she really brings alive the historical periods into which she delves. And it’s not surprising that Blackout and All Clear have won the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 2011 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the 2011 Hugo Award for Best Novel. So I do urge you, go and read them!
chasing bawa 
29 March, 2016 at 10:52 am
Gosh, I finally got around to reading this book, and then quickly followed up with To Say Nothing of the Dog. What impressive research and plotting! And humour, especially in the latter. Did you notice that different aspects of the time-space continuum are explored in these books? In Blackout/All Clear, she proposes one mechanism for the operation of the continuum with the exceptions and corrections, but it’s a different interpretation in To Say Nothing of the Dog. I guess once one’s done with all the books in the Oxford series, one would have a fairly thorough understanding of the intricacies of her time travel. Of course, the time aspect – I feel – is less important than the staging and events of the books, and mainly serves to add tension. What do you think?
30 March, 2016 at 10:54 am
I read Doomsday Book followed by To Say Nothing of the Dog and then Blackout/All Clear which I think is the sequence in which she wrote the books so you can see how their understanding of the time travelling mechanism changes and when they slowly begin to realise the flaws in their theories and the consequences of their actions. So overall I got a sense of impending doom which added to the tension in the stories. Please read Doomsday Book and let me know what you think – I loved it but it’s much darker in tone than the others. Willis is such a wonderful writer and her time travelling theories are so well thought out and complex. And her sense of humour is spot on. I love it.