Blackout

I am reviewing Connie Willis’s Blackout and All Clear together since they are not two books but really one lengthy (1100-page) book. (The decision to release the two books feels like an effort to extract more cash from readers, since Blackout has no ending and All Clear no beginning--one books abruptly and awkwardly ends, and the second merely picks up as if the reader has turned a page instead of starting a new book.) I generally don't take to overly lengthy books, but Blackout/All Clear really held my attention, and I'd urge even those who may be intimidated by lengthy tomes to give these books a chance.Blackout/All Clear has its flaws (which I will get to in a minute) but these books are also easy to recommend. Perhaps the best recommendation I can make is this: I cried at the end--more than once--which is not something I do often with books. There are some great moments of suspense and beauty in these books, and I am thankful I stuck with the lengthy and intricate story.These books are rich with history and characters, and a patient reader is rewarded with a series of overlapping and intertwined short stories that evolve and combine into a wonderfully complex puzzle of a plot populated with vivid characters. I cared for the characters and found I was fascinated with the tales of how Londoners came together, sacrificed, helped and protected each other and often went about their lives at a time when bombs and missiles were falling by the hundreds and thousands on their city. This is one of those rare books that makes history come alive, neither sacrificing the story nor the history.These books are historical fiction wrapped in a thin veneer of science fiction. I do not think my review will give away any spoilers, but anyone familiar with Willis' other books will know that the world she has created is one where time travel is a reality and historians traverse time to experience and observe what they previously could only ready and study. Blackout and All Clear take readers to WWII Dover, Dunkirk, Bletchley Park, St. Paul's, Trafalgar Square and elsewhere during the war, and they give a strong and immediate sense of the way the British persevered during some of the darkest and most difficult times in human history. I was thoroughly swept away and truly moved by some of the stories of sacrifice, bravery and loss. These books were literally (and not just figuratively) a page-turner for me. I had a hard time putting it down.So, why am I not giving this a five-star review? While I found the books very rewarding, they are not without their flaws, and it was within Willis' grasp to produce something truly great and not merely very good with a little more discipline (and, frankly, more than a little bit of editing.) Some readers complain that it is difficult to keep up with the overlapping story and characters--the book leaps forward and backward within the war years and outside of them (to 1995 and 2060) and layers in many characters, and it can be difficult to keep track of it all. The best advice I can give people is to simply approach these books as if you're reading short stories and not to worry about keeping track of it all--simply enjoy each plotline on its own and, as the books progress, the relationships between seemingly unrelated people and plots converge.For me, the biggest flaw was that Blackout/All Clear needed more than a bit of editing. Or perhaps Willis should have trusted her readers to put the pieces together more quickly than do the characters in her story.It is giving very little away to say that central themes of this book include that the historians who go back in time worry about returning to their contemporary period and fret about the impact they may have on history--but a little bit of this sort of worry goes a long, long way. Time after time, characters torture themselves about whether their presence may have inadvertently lost the war and seek signs they’ve created “discrepancies” in the timeline (which, for all their worries and effort, is an unknowable topic that gets tiresome well before Willis’ characters let it go.) Repeatedly, the characters chase around looking for ways to return home (long after readers know--and the characters should have realized--they cannot). And even once the pieces are brought together toward the end, Willis cannot help having her characters ponder time and again how one thing led to another. I found myself having a dialog with Willis, the author, wanting to tell her, “We get it! Move on!”I have no idea how often characters cite the proverbial "For Want of a Nail" rhyme in these books, but it is done A LOT—dozens of times, I’d guess. The repeated bludgeoning of readers with the meaning of this proverb came, for me, to represent how the author needed to stop reinforcing and returning to the same topics time and time and time again. The repetition of these themes detracts rather than enhances the wonderful narrative and characters Willis has created, and I found myself wondering why these seemingly smart characters were unable to reach obvious conclusions sooner. I am sure I am not alone in that I worked out the central problem at the core of this book 500 PAGES before the characters do, themselves.So, these books have some flaws, Willis could have trusted readers to work out the pieces, and this very good 1100-page work could have been an amazing 800-page book with more discipline and a sharper focus on what is necessary or not. That said, I once again want to reinforce that despite some frustration and even though they sometimes tried my patience just a bit, I still found Blackout and All Clear very rewarding and affecting. If I gripe a bit about these books, it's only because they were so good and it was apparent how tantalizingly close greatness was.

Even as a physicist, I am perfectly willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to novels that include all kinds of crazy time travel ideas---otherwise why read a book like Blackout? And Willis's time travel ideas are no more (or less) crazy than anyone else's. "Blackout" takes us into the midst of World War II England, and the author does a great job of painting a picture of London and its environs during the Blitz, focused not on the great figures (e.g., Churchill) but on `ordinary' individuals, with all of their strengths and flaws. But boy, the protagonists in this story are just mind-bogglingly dumb! Time travel is quite honestly less crazy than the idea that the people traveling back from the year 2060 to the 1940s would be so incredibly naive and clueless. Willis's story centers on what are essentially Oxford graduate students, whose field of study is called `history' by the author but is much closer to cultural anthropology than anything else. The students travel back in time to observe the foreign country of the past. Willis's view of what an historian does seems to be quite a lot of memorization of facts and dates, focused on one particular period of time to the exclusion of all else (several times one character or another bemoans the fact that if they are stuck back in time for a month or two longer than they should be, they won't know anything about what historical events happen next). Remarkably, too, while the students volunteer for these assignments to travel into the past and observe the behavior of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, they have almost no sympathy or interest in those people---in fact, as often as not, they muse upon how ignorant or irritating the people of the past are. While the students are there to observe, they actually seem completely disinterested in actually doing what their assignment is---rather, they are focused on getting to where they are supposed to be, or getting back home to Oxford 2060. But really none of that is as dumb as the specific actions and thoughts these `historians' have, and the way in which they handle their respective crises and conflicts. A character who is a student of the Blitz arrives in London 1940 and is surprised to find it is hard to get a job. She needs a black skirt to become a shopgirl at a department store and her very best idea for how to obtain one is to travel back to the year 2060 and get one from the Oxford wardrobe department, and spends a good part of the book trying to do just that. It never occurs to her that, well, they actually made clothing back in 1940 and, in fact, they actually SOLD clothing back in 1940. She could buy a black skirt back there in 1940 and presumably save the Oxford time travel budget a few pounds. A character who is a veteran of time travel assists in the evacuation of Dunkirk and then obsesses over the idea that he has somehow altered history. It doesn't occur to him that any action he takes is just as likely to alter history as any other, and in Willis's world people are explicitly prevented from doing so. How is it he's forgotten this fundamental fact of (Willis's) time travel? And, oddly, as an Oxford graduate student studying World War II, he complains that he knows nothing outside of what happens around the time of the Dunkirk evacuation. Perhaps Oxford in 2060 has lowered its standards, to admit students who know so little about their own field of study? All the characters get trapped in the past, for reasons that presumably are explained in the sequel. Their plan for what to do when stuck in the past is to wait for their colleagues back in Oxford in 2060 to send a `retrieval team' that will find them and get them back to their lives in the future. Sounds fine. And yet they each spend most of the book worrying that they have somehow missed their retrieval team---that it can't find them, because they aren't in the place they're supposed to be. This is their best plan? Surely if one is stuck in the past, one is likely to NOT be in the place one is supposed to be, and so a 'retrieval team' needs to be extremely good at finding people. There is no plan for how to communicate with their rescuers should they arrive, no backup plan, no emergency place to meet, no devices to use to contact each other (despite the great technology of time travel itself). They all act as if this is the very first time anyone has gone back into the past, and so they are making it up as they go along. It takes the entire book for a character to realize that---this being time travel---the retrieval team could have shown up the minute she arrived back in the past, as they could turn up whenever they wanted. Do they provide no training about time travel to these students? How can they just figure this out for the first time? There are so many dumb things the characters do, that I could go on. (And, interestingly, the characters of the past are far more cleanly and clearly drawn than the time travelers---there are three separate time traveling women who, as far as I could tell, were identical personalities and nearly impossible to distinguish from one another). But I'm going to give Willis one benefit of the doubt here. She makes many allusions to Shakespeare throughout the book, and I have to wonder if perhaps what she was really doing with all of these implausible mistakes by her characters was putting together a `comedy of errors' in the Shakespearean sense. Just as Shakespeare's characters do maddeningly dumb things sometimes, for the sake of a laugh, perhaps that is what Willis's historians are doing. Of course no one would behave as they do, but that is the point: they are exposing the flaws of human beings in an extreme way, making a point about the futility of trying to control one's own destiny, in the face of fate. Maybe. But maybe they really as just as dumb as they seem.

Ficção científica e história misturados de forma magnífica, só não dei 5 estrelas porque o livro demora um pouco pra engrenar, embora uma vez que engrena é o famoso "page turner". Uma pena não ter esses livros em português.

Great quality paper, soft & tactile with good sized text...just started reading it and i need to get ready to go out but i seriously can't put it down! Buy the 2nd book at the same time, it's basically Pt.2. Ok now back to my book!!

I love these two books (Black Out and All Clear). I’ve read them twice. It’s a time travel novel and I’m not sure of the historical accuracy for when they end up (London, the Blitz) but it’s still one to lose yourself in. Connie Willis has written various novels about a university where time travel takes place for history students. There are a couple of books that all link together by way of this school and some of the characters. They don’t need to be read as a series though.It’s well and truely worth the 5 stars I give it.

Ce premier de 2 tomes dont l'histoire se déroule pendant la 2è guerre mondiale m'a tenue en haleine jusqu'au bout.J'ai beaucoup aimé voir l'histoire du Blitz de cette manière.Les personnages sont peu développés et il y a quelques longueurs qui ne m'ont pas empêchée de tourner les pages toute la nuit.A noter : la suite n'est malheureusement pas à la hauteur....

... One expects more from Connie Willis. Interesting, well documented with historical data, it makes you feel what had to be like to live as a civilian in the daily bombed London, but there are too many pages describing the main characters going from A to B, then deciding they should have stayed in A, coming back there just to change their minds and returning to B for whatever reason. That's repetitive and probably unnecessary. Nevertheless, if you're patient, the actions develops into some great cliffhangers and brilliant moments here and there.