Topic: Reading
It's interesting, the number of strands of things I'm interested in that Connie Willis has drawn together in Doomsday Book in an intriguing mesh of science fiction and historical fiction. The novel opens in the near future, where time travel is used by historians to engage in field work in their period of interest, blurring the boundaries between history and anthropology. Kivrin, a young historian at Oxford University, is about to be sent back to the early years of the fourteenth century, a period previously deemed too dangerous for direct study by anyone, let alone a female undergraduate student. The machinations of university politics have created an opportunity for her, however, one that she is determined to seize. Despite all her careful preparations, crisis after crisis erupts in both the past and the future, challenging Kivrin, those in the future who are concerned about her, and those in the past she comes to care about.
I think what I responded to most strongly in the novel is the way in which all the years of planning and study that went into Kivrin's project have, at best, mixed results. Little in the past is what she expected, proving the limitations of study done at a distance, rather than through experience. Kivrin's resourcefulness and the relationships she forms are every bit as important to her survival as all of her preparations. The past is another world, and an unfamiliar and bewildering one. All the study in the world couldn't have prepared her for everything she encounters in the past.
The picture of the past that Willis paints is detailed and evocative, in both its hardship and its beauty. Willis' speculation about the people of a rural English manor in the fourteenth century and the way they live is unromantic and realistic. The world of the near-future is a familiar one - not at all a high-tech paradise. The little details of university politics, bureaucracy and infighting are all too true to life. Most importantly, the contrast between the past and the future lies more in wealth and technology than in any change in human nature. Willis explores the richness and messiness of relationships, and reflects on altruism, selfishness and suffering, and in particular, what people owe to each other by virtue of their shared humanity. The nature of the things that have true value in life, she suggests, has not changed in seven centuries.