A number of years ago, some of my most well-read book club teens recommended that I read To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. They were convinced that I would love the humor, the nonsense, and the brilliance of that hilarious story about time travel. They were right. It is a little P. G. Wodehouse, a lot The Importance of Being Earnest, and a bit of Agatha Christie with a dash of time travel thrown in. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a perfectly wonderful little romp through the Victorian English countryside. When I got done reading it, they said, “Did you know it is part of a set of ‘Oxford Time Travel’ books?” I did not. But my interest was piqued.
Last year, I read her two-part World War II romance: Blackout and All Clear. To say that I loved those stories would be a tremendous understatement. I read them twice in seven months, and when my daughter started them this weekend, I almost joined her for a third read in less than a year. You can read my review of those books here.
Connie Willis is a master storyteller who loves old movies (and new movies) almost as much as she loves great literature. Consequently, her storytelling is richly visual, and when reading, it often feels like I am watching a movie in my mind. In 1992, she crafted a novel that was set in 2054 as well as during the Medieval Bubonic Plague. I read the Doomsday Book in February and March of 2020. Actually, I finished reading it a mere four to six hours before my husband called to tell me that the schools were shutting down for two weeks because of growing concerns over the devastating illness in New York. Willis’s incredible and vivid descriptions haunted me throughout our COVID quarantine!
We have been doing some hefty renovations the last six weeks, and I have needed some audiobooks to keep me company. I read Bellwether (an interesting little story) and Crosstalk (a fascinating story, but it abounds in content considerations). I decided to revisit Doomsday. I remember appreciating it, but being appalled by the lecherous old men, frustrated by the bad priests and sanctimonious old crow, and disgusted by the vivid accounts of how the disease was destroying the human body. I was curious what I would think of it now.
Doomsday is gross. And unsettling. And brilliant. I think that my seventeen-year-old boy (who loves Willis) will appreciate it. I am not content to hand it to my innocent fifteen-year-old yet. Greta wants to be a nurse, so the vivid descriptions of the plague victims would not bother her, but the lecherous old men in positions of power might scandalize her.
Poor Rosamund is only twelve years old when her disgusting fifty-year-old betrothed harasses her for affection that she thinks is unseemly. Add the vile priests and a loose serving girl into the mix and I think it just isn’t a great choice for her at this stage in her development.
Doomsday comes early in the Oxford Time Travel books and the mechanisms of time travel are still not well understood by the characters. Especially when trying to travel as far back as the 1300s.
When Balliol College’s Medieval department contrives to send young historian Kivrin back to 1329, several things happen at the same time which causes her to land in the Oxford countryside at Christmas in 1348 instead – just in time for the plague to arrive. In a classic Connie Willis twist, Kivrin (who is inoculated from the plague) arrives at her destination just as a fever is overtaking her. A fever that she contracted in 2054 which is about to spread like wildfire throughout Oxford in 2054. What that fever is and how it is happening is a mystery that requires several hundred fascinating pages to solve. So, while Kivrin is fighting for her life in a medieval village, her friends in Oxford are fighting for theirs.
As Kivrin is recovering from her fever, guests are arriving at the manor house to visit the family that has taken her in. Later, they are visited by an envoy from the Bishop. One or both of those groups are carriers of the plague.
As much as I hate to see priests as bad guys, I do think that Willis draws an accurate picture of the Middle Ages in this story. Throughout her many books, she has bad religious characters and good ones. In this story, the lecherous priests are vile and die gruesome deaths. But the very best hero of the story is a very poor and simple parish priest who cannot even read. He has memorized all of the masses and all of the prayers out of a profound love for Christ and his vocation. When any character is dying, Fr. Roche is at the bedside keeping vigil, hearing confessions, praying, and anointing each and every person. He leaves their side only to attend to others in need of the sacraments, to toll the death bell, to bury the dead, or to pray the mass. Kivrin rightly calls him a saint.
In 2054, religion has degraded even more than it has today. Each sect of any religious kind sees itself as a fraternity on a college campus that is full of Greek houses. No one takes any of it very seriously. And so, like her contemporaries, Kivrin is rational and not at all religious. Plague, however, is good for helping people wrestle with their ideas about what actually matters. Kivrin spends much of the time protecting herself from believing in God until she finally starts fighting with Him for how he treats his own. She doesn’t come to a great conversion, but by the end, she is open to who God might be.
As I said above, Willis’s storytelling is very vivid and reads like a movie playing in the mind. Each plague victim succumbs to the plague differently and we get a lot of that detail. Reading Doomsday after living through 2020 is fascinating.
This is not my favorite Willis book, but it is well done! The audio is lovely.