(no subject)
May. 31st, 2011 11:22 amOkay, you guys know I am a Connie Willis fan from way back - To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book were some of my formative texts - so believe me when I say there is a really good book buried somewhere deep in the depths of the Blackout/All Clear duology. There is! Probably about two hundred pages' worth of one. The problem is that those two hundred pages are wrapped up in NINE HUNDRED MORE pages of CONSTANT POINTLESS PANIC.
All right, I shouldn't say pointless; that is unfair. The three lead characters of the book - Polly, Mike, and Eileen-called-Merope - are all grad student historians trapped in the past during the Blitz, and they don't know if they can go home, and there are bombs falling around them, it's probably fair to panic about this. But, I am sorry, after the first week or two of panic you would think you would maybe . . . settle down? Learn some coping mechanisms? Deal with the fact that, yes, there are bombs falling down on you and you don't know exactly when they'll fall, JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE that you are interacting with? Or maybe, if you insist on retaining a historical perspective, try maybe TAKING SOME ACTUAL NOTES?
(This is maybe what frustrated me the most: none of them seemed excited or interested to be in the past or acted like historians at any point! None of them evidenced any kind of passion; from the minute they arrive, even before things go horribly wrong, it's constant flailing panic! Kids, you are all going to get failing grades on your theses and it SERVES YOU RIGHT.)
They would be great drinking game books, though.
Every time a historian sees a small detail that doesn't match something they saw reported in a future newspaper and jumps instantly to the conclusion that they have CHANGED THE PAST, LOST THE WAR and DESTROYED THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM: drink
Every time Mike flails off somewhere on a pointless mission to get them all out of there that yields zero results: drink
Every time Polly keeps a pointless secret from the other historians because she doesn't want them to panic (despite the fact that everyone is already panicking and nobody as much as Polly): drink
Every time someone hopefully mentions how the RETRIEVAL TEAM is coming to get them: drink (drink twice for every time this happens a solid month after it has already become blindingly clear that NO ONE IS COMING.)
Except the problem is that playing with just one of these rules would get you exceedingly trashed by the time you were halfway through All Clear, and playing with all of them would probably give you a serious case of alcohol poisoning!
Alternately, if you just want the shortcut version to alcohol poisoning, try this rule:
Every time a chapter ends on an OMINOUS CLIFFHANGER about something that MIGHT BE PROOF OF HISTORY BEING CHANGED (that is then resolved with proof that history was not in fact changed): drink
<---- THIS IS 50% OF THE CHAPTERS
Every time a chapter ends on an OMINOUS CLIFFHANGER about someone JUST MISSING an important communication with someone: drink
<---- THIS IS THE OTHER 50%
As I said, there are interesting stories going on in this book! Connie Willis could just have written a straight historical novel about the Blitz, and it would have been great. Or she could have written the book about how the self-absorbed historians learn to get over their self-absorption and their assumptions of safety, about how they live in the same danger as the people in the past and fulfil their human responsibilities to them - which is what Eileen's story, I think, was meant to be, which is why Eileen was the most likeable and why her arc actually felt like an arc! It could have been, as I said, a nice reasonable two-hundred-page book. Instead it is a twelve hundred page epic which I spent wanting to smack Mike (constantly), Polly (90% of the time), Eileen (50% of the time) and, sadly, Mr. Dunworthy (100% of the time) over the head and tell them to GET OVER THEMSELVES. And - look. I've read the Connie Willis book in which she killed off the protagonist. I've read the Connie Willis book in which she killed off everyone but the protagonist, leaving her to cope with eternal psychological damage and survivor's guilt. I know she's capable of bleak and horrific endings, and yet everyone in these books spent so much time worrying about the space-time continuum dissolving and inevitable doom and everyone dying horribly that I never, not even for a single instant, thought that it was likely to happen.
Because I could not smack everyone over the head though, I instead spent a large portion of this weekend shouting at![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
varadia about how much I wanted to smack them all over the head. And that was very satisfying!
All right, I shouldn't say pointless; that is unfair. The three lead characters of the book - Polly, Mike, and Eileen-called-Merope - are all grad student historians trapped in the past during the Blitz, and they don't know if they can go home, and there are bombs falling around them, it's probably fair to panic about this. But, I am sorry, after the first week or two of panic you would think you would maybe . . . settle down? Learn some coping mechanisms? Deal with the fact that, yes, there are bombs falling down on you and you don't know exactly when they'll fall, JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE that you are interacting with? Or maybe, if you insist on retaining a historical perspective, try maybe TAKING SOME ACTUAL NOTES?
(This is maybe what frustrated me the most: none of them seemed excited or interested to be in the past or acted like historians at any point! None of them evidenced any kind of passion; from the minute they arrive, even before things go horribly wrong, it's constant flailing panic! Kids, you are all going to get failing grades on your theses and it SERVES YOU RIGHT.)
They would be great drinking game books, though.
Every time a historian sees a small detail that doesn't match something they saw reported in a future newspaper and jumps instantly to the conclusion that they have CHANGED THE PAST, LOST THE WAR and DESTROYED THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM: drink
Every time Mike flails off somewhere on a pointless mission to get them all out of there that yields zero results: drink
Every time Polly keeps a pointless secret from the other historians because she doesn't want them to panic (despite the fact that everyone is already panicking and nobody as much as Polly): drink
Every time someone hopefully mentions how the RETRIEVAL TEAM is coming to get them: drink (drink twice for every time this happens a solid month after it has already become blindingly clear that NO ONE IS COMING.)
Except the problem is that playing with just one of these rules would get you exceedingly trashed by the time you were halfway through All Clear, and playing with all of them would probably give you a serious case of alcohol poisoning!
Alternately, if you just want the shortcut version to alcohol poisoning, try this rule:
Every time a chapter ends on an OMINOUS CLIFFHANGER about something that MIGHT BE PROOF OF HISTORY BEING CHANGED (that is then resolved with proof that history was not in fact changed): drink
<---- THIS IS 50% OF THE CHAPTERS
Every time a chapter ends on an OMINOUS CLIFFHANGER about someone JUST MISSING an important communication with someone: drink
<---- THIS IS THE OTHER 50%
As I said, there are interesting stories going on in this book! Connie Willis could just have written a straight historical novel about the Blitz, and it would have been great. Or she could have written the book about how the self-absorbed historians learn to get over their self-absorption and their assumptions of safety, about how they live in the same danger as the people in the past and fulfil their human responsibilities to them - which is what Eileen's story, I think, was meant to be, which is why Eileen was the most likeable and why her arc actually felt like an arc! It could have been, as I said, a nice reasonable two-hundred-page book. Instead it is a twelve hundred page epic which I spent wanting to smack Mike (constantly), Polly (90% of the time), Eileen (50% of the time) and, sadly, Mr. Dunworthy (100% of the time) over the head and tell them to GET OVER THEMSELVES. And - look. I've read the Connie Willis book in which she killed off the protagonist. I've read the Connie Willis book in which she killed off everyone but the protagonist, leaving her to cope with eternal psychological damage and survivor's guilt. I know she's capable of bleak and horrific endings, and yet everyone in these books spent so much time worrying about the space-time continuum dissolving and inevitable doom and everyone dying horribly that I never, not even for a single instant, thought that it was likely to happen.
Because I could not smack everyone over the head though, I instead spent a large portion of this weekend shouting at
varadia about how much I wanted to smack them all over the head. And that was very satisfying!
