Doomsday Book by Connie WillisSpectra (Bantam), 1992

Earlier this month I read and really enjoyed Blackout, Connie Willis’s latest book, so I knew I wanted to go back and read this one, which is set in the same world. It’s Oxford in 2054 and the history department, which uses time travel to observe the past, is at the center of this story. Kivrin Engle, a young medievalist, is about to take the first trip to the Middle Ages. Whole centuries had been off-limits to historians due to their danger, but the acting head of the history department, a medievalist himself, is eager to get someone into the 1300s, however risky that may be. The acting head and the rest of his department, though, aren’t so great at planning and preparation, so Mr. Dunworthy, whose area of specialty is the 20th century but who has been unofficially tutoring Kivrin and acting as her mentor, steps in to make sure everything goes smoothly. Except, of course, it doesn’t. The tech running the trip falls ill, along with much of the rest of Oxford, Kivrin ends up in the wrong year and isn’t sure she can find her way back, and everyone ends up in quite a bit of danger.

At the start of the book, Kivrin talks about how she wants to go to the past to learn about ordinary people: “There are scarcely any records, except for parish registers and tax rolls,” she says, “and nobody knows what their lives were like at all. That’s why I want to go. I want to find out about them, how they lived, what they were like” (7). And learn she does. Some of the lessons are a bit obviously foreshadowed (you know, when the acting head of the history department talks about how people in the middle ages didn’t feel grief, weren’t bothered by death, etc. that Kivrin will learn otherwise), but Kivrin’s experience in a small village is still touching: a family takes her in and takes care of her; she grows close to them and the village priest, and meanwhile, learns how much Dunworthy’s caring and concern matter to her. This all sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s really well done: the book ends up being about faith (in humanity, mostly) and love and determination as much as about time travel or the past, but you know, it works.