Doomsday book

Doomsday Book is by no means a perfect novel; though it may just be the perfect novel for Christmas 2014.

It's tempting to say, like some reviews here do, that it really needs an editor. Not because there's anything wrong with taking your time to set things up, but because for the longest time, almost nothing happens - and it does so in an annoyingly self-assured way. She establishes her two separate timelines and then spends ages describing both without much happening, endlessly repeating jokes that weren't very funny the first time, and while I actually kind of like that her future version of Oxford is painfully 1970-ish (land lines! No indoor heating! Computer terminals that take up entire wings!), at times it's like an unfunny take on Pratchett's Unseen University. The 14th century timeline is more interesting, but again, repetitive as fuck and frustrating in that the plot is entirely about our heroine waiting to get the chance to talk to this one guy who always seems to be otherwise occupied. And sometime around page 300, you start wondering if the person who wrote the blurb on the back simply got bored and made something up.

But stick with it. Because Willis is playing a long game, and the thing about the world ending is it never arrives with trumpets and a huge banner saying "TURN BACK NOW".

Because this is a novel about the black death, and if you need spoiler warnings to tell you that things are not going to end up as cutesy as they start out, then I'm sorry but why are you even bothering reading this? The black death wiped out half of Europe. There were villages, entire towns, that simply ceased to exist and were forgotten for centuries - but that's the historical perspective, which completely ignores how the people themselves saw it. Our safe, trauma-avoiding 21st century culture has no tools for handling that kind of carnage; we have monuments with the names of every victim of 9/11, the Boxing Day tsunami, etc. (Every victim from where we're from, that is.) They number in the thousands. We panic when a single (white) ebola patient is discovered. When we get to the shoah, our minds balk; six million dead? An anomaly; evil; incomprehensible, even though it's so clearly delineated. It becomes a statistic, safely out of range. We may pity the people of 1348, so clueless, so uninformed, so savage in their reactions - witch burnings! Pogroms! "Medicine" that only made things worse! All so very different, of course, from our society (just yesterday someone, cheered on by politicians who talk about the necessity of listening to the concerns of the common man, burned down a mosque in Sweden). The people of 1348 didn't know what a germ was; what's our excuse?

Yes, Willis openly invites those comparisons, and not subtly, but there's nothing subtle about the topic of fear of the unknown, of our need to find something to blame. That joke was never funny in the first place. And if you stick with it, Doomsday Book might just break your heart.