Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Connie Willis, My Hero

Connie Willis is my hero. Wow! I listened to her novel All Clear as an audiobook and was astounded by her storytelling and also by the detail associated with the World War II-London historical moment. 

All Clear is the second in a two-book series depicting time-traveling historians from 2060 who go to World War II London for research purposes and get stuck there. I haven't read the first book, Blackout, but I have read another of Willis's time-travel books, Doomsday Book, about travel to medieval England, and Willis's Passage, which is about near-death experiences but involves at least mental time travel. Both of those novels are also very good. 

With regard to All Clear, I want to note a key sequence where the trapped characters are trying to meet up with another time-traveler at St. Paul's Cathedral during a December night in 1941 when much of the cityscape around the cathedral catches fire. The scene covers the night-time hours of one day, but the scene continues for many pages as the characters are delayed, delayed, delayed. The scene is particularly impressive because of the attention to historical detail. Because the sequence is long, readers feel as if they’re in the moment in the World War II bombing of London as the characters attempt to find their fellow time-traveler, find one another, prevent buildings and the cathedral from catching fire, and save lives, including their own. My experience of the sequence's duration was particularly powerful because I was listening to the novel read aloud, which slows down the storytelling, as the eye can't skip forward when the brain wants to see what will happen. I was totally immersed in the characters' desperation to reach the cathedral. 

Perhaps a more interesting aspect of the novel from the perspective of narrative theory (and here I should warn about revealing a detail that may spoil the impact of the sequence for folks who haven't yet read the book) is the fact that Willis integrates the delay into the actual plot. Avid readers will recognize that frustrating characters' goals is a great way to build suspense and keep readers reading. In other words, frustration is an effective narrative-marketing plot device. As I was reading, I was thinking, wow, Willis just keeps throwing barrier after barrier in her characters' way, yet I want more than ever to find out WHAT HAPPENS! I was glued to the story, despite the fact that I felt manipulated by it--very impressive. Then, Willis impressed me even further by making the delays of that night part of the plot: the characters start to realize that they are trapped in 1941 and experience repeated failures to return home not because they have interfered with history but because the Net by which they travel is protecting history. Even bigger wow. The delays that were starting to feel heavy-handed were exactly the clues the characters and readers needed to figure out what was happening, which turned what I thought was a narrative weakness into an unexpected and therefore impressive strength. 

I went out and bought several more Willis books. I'm not much of a short story reader, but her stories have won top awards, so I guess I'm headed in that direction, as well as reading the rest of the novels.  

Image Source: All Clear Audio Book Cover. Amazon. com. n.d. Web. 21 Aug. 2013. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41zICyP89NL._SX260_.jpg

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