Whole swathes of this book are about illness. Serious illness, like the plague and a vicious influenza, one in the distant past and another in the distant future.
It’s a clever concept, this book. There is time travel, in that distant future, and historians attempt to infiltrate the past in order to better understand it. Into this program goes one Kivrin, a Middle Ages scholar who insists on a trip to the 1300s, and despite the fact that she is a single woman travelling alone, at a time when such a thing was just not done, and was dangerous as hell, she is permitted to do so by her besotted advisor, Dunworthy.
This is a long book. Oftentimes repetitive, and there is a lot of delirium brought about by assorted fevers, as well as a lot, lot, lot of death. I’m not sure I liked it for most of the time I was reading it, but looking back on it now that I am at last out of its harrowing grip, I can appreciate its many splendours. If nothing else, I can certainly see why it is accounted a modern-day classic of the genre (whatever genre it is: Historical Science Fiction?) and I will certainly be reading the other four books in this series. Most of which I — of course — already own.
SCORECARD
TBR DAY 277: Doomsday Book (Oxford Historians #1) by Connie Willis
GENRE: Science Fiction, Historical Fiction
PUBLISHED: 1992
TIME ON THE TBR: 3 years.
PURCHASED FROM: Collins Booksellers.
KEEP: Yep.
[…] is so different to Doomsday Book, the first novel in the Oxford Time Travel series. For a start, this book is funny. It is all […]