Novel Readings

I don’t want you to blame yourself for what happened. I know you would have come to get me if you could, but I couldn’t have gone anyway, not with Agnes ill.

I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.

Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog did not really prepare me for Doomsday Book, even though they are in the same series and are structurally very similar: both belong to her “Oxford time Travel” series and involve “historians” sent back in time as part of current-day (actually futuristic) research. In both of them, the novel’s present is marked by bureaucratic stuffiness, mostly well-meaning incompetence, and crises more or less of the “stuff that goes on at work” variety—dealing with annoying colleagues, for example. But in To Say Nothing of the Dog it all stays essentially comic, and the trip to the Victorian period is an affectionate pastiche, full of clichés and peppered with literary allusions, many of them to the Golden Age crime fiction to which the intricate puzzle plot is overtly paying homage.

To say that Doomsday Book is darker is an understatement. In this one, both historical layers deal with unfolding pandemics (linked, we eventually learn, through an archeological dig). While the present-day storyline retains some comic aspects, the humor recedes as the crisis mounts; the bureaucratic rigidity that prevents a more nimble and effective response also felt less funny because it was a bit too real. As the infection spreads and characters become ill and even die, well, that’s not funny at all, of course. I’m going to avoid making a lot of COVID connections, but I do feel as if it would be salutary for some segments of our society to remember how virulent and scary our virus was—and how prevalent it still is.

Along those lines, the atmosphere of mounting dread in Doomsday Book felt pretty familiar to me—and though in the novel’s present the characters have all kinds of highly effective responses, it still takes them a while to figure out what exactly they are dealing with and actually enact the right measures. Even so, things are much worse in the other timeline, where the modern researcher, Kivrin, has been erroneously transported, not to the relative benignity of 1320, as intended, but to 1348 just as the bubonic plague is beginning its deadly spread across England.

The 14th-century part of Doomsday Book would have been a completely gripping historical novel all on its own. Willis gives us a detailed picture of the setting, from the pristine forests and the astonishingly starry skies of the pre-modern landscape to the cold, grime, and stench of medieval peasants’ huts—and, for that matter, of a manor house of the same period. Before the plague arrives (and before Kivrin realizes the mistake made in her “drop”) she is ill herself, so her first impressions combine the disorientation of temporal relocation with her feverish confusions. Eventually her ‘translator’ begins working and bit by bit she gets to know the people whose lives she has landed in the midst of, with their aspirations and jealousies and forbidden loves. She becomes especially close to Agnes, the younger daughter of the house.  These personal connections make the onset of the plague something Kivrin bears witness to in a way that is in one sense entirely out of keeping with her role as a historian, but in another sense fundamental to it. In other contexts I have often quoted what Carlyle said about Scott’s fiction: that his historical novels

 taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught: that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies and abstractions of men. Not abstractions were they, not diagrams and theorems; but men, in buff or other coats and breeches, with colour in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach, and the idioms, features and vitalities of very men. It is a little word this; inclusive of great meaning! History will henceforth have to take thought of it.

This is very much Kivrin’s experience, and thus ours, as we read both Willis’s conventional narration of Kivrin’s time in 1348 and the more fragmentary bulletins Kivrin records for those back home in her own time, which gradually take on more and more the character of the few remaining testaments of those who actually lived through the plague years, documents which had once seemed to Kivrin melodramatic and implausible. Where the archive is scant, as it must be in such dire circumstances, we rely on our imaginations to fill in the blanks and to fully humanize it. I don’t think anyone could read Doomsday Book and not be overcome with horror and pity for those who faced what they understandably believed was the end of the world.

But Doomsday Book is not just a historical novel, and though at times I wondered about the value of the time-travel framing, by the end I appreciated the layers Willis had added through it. The most obvious one was just the point that, for all our advances in science and medicine, we are not immune from catastrophes, including ones caused by mutating viruses. A more subtle and thought-provoking one was the interplay between the science fiction aspects of time travel and the religious beliefs of the 14th-century people Kivrin encounters, especially the priest, Father Roche, who tends Kivrin in her initial illness and then labours beside her as one by one the others around them fall victim to the plague—until his turn comes as well. It turns out that Father Roche sees Kivrin’s arrival as literally miraculous, her presence among them a kind of gift or grace from God, whose love and mercy he never doubts, in spite of everything he sees and experiences. For Kivrin, fighting against a malicious, invisible enemy, and always thinking of those who care for her and especially of her tutor, Mr. Dunworthy, whom she believes to the very end will come to her rescue, the line between science and religion starts to blur. Who is Mr. Dunworthy to Kivrin, after all, but an unseen presence—the thought of whom gives her hope and strength in her darkest hours—and an audience for her testimony, which is spoken into a recording device which it had seemed so clever to place in her wrist, so that she would appear to be praying? “It’s strange,” she says in one of her final such messages to someone who may or may not ever receive it;

When I couldn’t find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death nor seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute.