Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I wanted to like Doomsday Book. I respected the five years of work that went into it, the Hugo and Nebula awards it earned, and the recommendation by friends. I expected something rich and detailed, something that would draw me in and not want to let go. What I got was a "whole lotta nothing." Had this book been a third of its near 600-page length it might have been a tight, moving story. As it is, the characters have seemingly eons of time to wander through, both forwards and backwards. The book contains two stories running in parallel. In the 'modern' one (actually several decades from now) Kivrin, a young Oxford historian, is sent back in time to 1320 despite great misgivings by her professor, James Dunworthy. Dunworthy spends the next several weeks trying to make sure she's all right and can return home, a formidable task due to an epidemic that has broken out at the college and a hopelessly ignorant department head who organized the 'drop.' The second story deals with Kivrin's experiences in the past, and her own battles against ignorance and illness. The ever-present questions are, "will Kivrin get home?" "will she die in the past?" "will everyone die in the future?" and "can any of this be stopped?" When I say "ever-present" that's exactly (unfortunately) what I mean. 200 pages into Doomsday Book I thought that I'd never read so much of so little. 400 pages in, when then modern folks learn an important (and obvious since about page 20) fact about Kivrin's trip back in time, I thought that at last we could move forward. And we did, a little, but not much, and not enough. So what fills 600 pages? The same questions, over and over again. The same characters, exhibiting the same behavior that they did in their first appearance. The same technical information, repeated constantly. And a minimal story, about two separate epidemics. Even these are reported more as casualty lists than personal reactions to illness and death. Ms. Willis gives us little opportunity to truly inhabit either world, holding us at a distance with endlessly repeated facts. The large group of characters never seem more than one-dimensional props, conveniently there to manipulate the story when needed. The biggest question mark is Dunworthy and his obsession with Kivrin. His colleagues and friends are dying around him and he thinks only of a student, not even his personal student. Why? He doesn't develop this feeling over the course of time; he's plopped in that way and stays so until the end. Nothing changes, the other deaths barely touch him; it's Kivrin start to finish. And we're never told why. I thought at least that we'd be treated to some kind of love story, but no. It just is what it is, another fact we're to accept. What is perhaps most aggravating about Doomsday Book is that some of the facts it loves are manipulated so as to make little or no sense. For instance, a large part of the book deals with the difficulty of getting someone on the phone, leaving a message, or even finding a phone to use. Dunworthy resorts to having characters wait in his room to take messages for him while he's out. This would seem absurd even today, and I would imagine that in an age where time travel is possible people would not have discontinued the use of cell phones, voice mail, or even answering machines. The Medieval world has incongruities as well, as when Willis describes a landscape after a fresh snowfall, where roads show up as black lines. How is this possible? A) it just snowed. B) Everyone is dead, so no one has traveled lately. C) presumably the plow hasn't just gone through. These roads would be covered in white snow, just like everything else. It's obvious to us, but it's crucial to the story that they be black, so they're black. The late film critic Gene Siskel had a wonderful question when reviewing a movie; "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?" I'd apply that here in this form; "Is this book more interesting than the author's research materials?" I'd have to say no; I did learn things about Medieval life, but found myself wanting to read the original sources in order to complete the sketchy picture. Kivrin arrives in the past in a haze of illness, but the fog never seems to clear, and we see little of how this life actually affects her beyond a historical-document feeling. The most ridiculous element is perhaps that she's supposed to be viewed as a saint sent by God to help the locals through this time. This is not shown to us by anything the characters do or say; it's simply stated to us. Without backing it up with actions or reactions it means nothing. It's just another fact, weak and debatable.