DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis
First published by Bantam, 1993
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards
You know you’ve read a good book when
the world and the characters created within its pages
become more real to you than the world outside, and
when they continue to haunt you long after you’ve
read the last word and put the book away.
So it was with Doomsday Book (with its echoes
of the Domesday Book compiled by William the
Conqueror’s surveyors after 1066 to record absolutely
everything that had fallen into his possession.) The
novel was lent to me by a friend in the late 1990s. I
was on holiday and had to read it in a hurry so I could
return it before I left. I gulped it down, and
subsequently bought my own two copies (just in case
I lost one) and read it all over again.
Doomsday Book is a time-slip back to 1348 at a
time when plague is ravaging England. It starts in
Oxford in the present as historians from rival colleges
squabble over the tactics needed to send a history
student, Kivrin, back to 1320 to investigate an ancient
village, Skendgate, the site of a dig in contemporary
times, in the year 2054.
Kivrin has all the confidence of youth and is
desperate to go. Her mentor, Mr Dunworthy, has
grave reservations but is overruled – and meantime an
unknown and deadly virus has been unleashed,
causing a pandemic that contemporary medicine is
unable to treat.
As a consequence, Kivrin is sent to the wrong
decade and, being infected before leaving Oxford, is
unconscious when the Net opens into the past. She is
found and given shelter, but later is unable to locate
her way back to the drop to be rescued and returned to
the present. Nor does she know that there is no help
on the way, for Oxford is locked down in quarantine,
the labs are closed and those responsible for sending
her into the past are themselves now too ill to go in
search of her. The unfolding tragedy of the plague as
it claims people whom Kivrin has grown to love is
contrasted with plague in the present where people
are equally unable to find a cure.
The irrepressible Colin brings some light relief in
contemp time as he runs errands for everyone
including the frantic Mr Dunworthy, who knows
something is terribly wrong but is too ill to do
anything about it. So, too, do the love-rat William
Gaddson, who tries to persuade his numerous
girlfriends to use their various positions of authority
to help reopen the Net, while everyone does their best
to avoid his mother, with her doom-laden readings
from the Bible.
But who can forget little Agnes with her black
puppy and her irritating little bell, or her older sister
Rosemund, who waits in mortal fear for her marriage
to the grotesque Sir Bloet? And then there’s Father