The Captive Reader

I loved Doomsday Book by Connie Willis and am so relieved to be able to say that.  After being amused but not impressed by To Say Nothing of the Dog and incredibly disappointed by Blackout and All Clear, I was ready to write Willis off completely.  But not before reading Doomsday Book, which has been on my TBR list since I was fourteen.  That is twelve years.  I may have taken my time to get to it but it was worth the wait.

All Kivrin Engle wants to do is visit the Middle Ages.  In 2054, Oxford is sending historians back in time to all sorts of events and periods to observe history first hand.  But not the 14^th Century, the period Kivrin is so anxious to visit.  Her tutor, James Dunsworthy, reminds her over and over of all the reason it is unsafe – widespread disease, lawlessness, etc – and how difficult it would be for a 21^st Century woman to blend in – she would need to grow her hair, to be familiar with religious customs, and understand contemporary farming practices, among other things – but none of it persuades Kivrin.  She devotes herself to studying everything she could possibly need to know, gets all her medical inoculations, and prepares to go back to 1320 in a drop run by the – in Professor Dunsworthy’s opinion – criminally irresponsible Medieval department.  Dunsworthy may be plagued with worries but Kivrin, with the energy and optimism of youth, can’t wait to begin her long-anticipated adventure.

But something goes very wrong.  The technician who set the drop coordinates, Badri Chaudhuri, is able to tell Professor Dunsworthy that much before falling deathly ill.  And then others begin to get sick, one after the other, and it is not long before all of Oxford is under quarantine with everyone trying to figure out what the illness is and where it came from while Professor Dunsworthy goes half-mad trying to figure out what went wrong with Kivrin’s drop.

All of Kivrin’s preparations, her carefully prepared backstory about being robbed on the road, prove useless once she is dropped in the 14^th Century.  By the time she passes through the net, she is delirious, struck down by the same illness devastating modern-day Oxford.  She awakes to find herself in the household of Lady Eliwys, whose reasons for being in this remote house outside Oxford with her two daughters while her husband and sons are back in Bath it takes Kivrin far too long to piece together. After she is fully recovered and has befriended both of Lady Eliwys’s daughters (five year old Agnes and twelve year old Rosamund) as well as the local priest, Father Roche, Kivrin begins to notice the inconsistencies between her studies of the period and what she is witnessing.  Some are scholarship issues, sources having been few and inconsistent, but she eventually realises that something went seriously, disastrously wrong with her drop.  She is in the wrong year: it is 1348, not 1320.  The year the plague arrived in England.

As two mysterious and deadly diseases progress in both time periods, Professor Dunsworthy struggles to find out what happened to Kivrin and to reach her while Kivrin, inoculated against the plague, fights to save those around her from the disease that killed half of Europe, knowing that by staying to nurse them she has missed the net’s opening and her only chance to return to her own time.

This book got to me in a way that, based on my previous frustrating experiences with Willis, I would never have expected.  Certain sections gave me chills and I found myself in tears more than once.  Kivrin’s experiences of loss are more detailed and numerous than what Dunsworthy encounters in the 21^st Century but somehow it was his sections that upset me the most.  Kivrin is equally helpless but at least she knows that those she loves in her own time are safe (even though the reader knows they aren’t).  Dunsworthy has no such comfort.  He is losing friends on a daily basis and knows that a student he loves is in danger, though, with Badri sick, he spends most of the novel not knowing what exactly that danger may be.  He lives in fear that she is sick and helpless, feeling abandoned and scared, lost to them forever.  Kivrin’s logs – her verbal recordings of her experiences – are all addressed to Dunsworthy and his thoughts are mostly of her; it is a very intimate look at their close relationship and it was the moments when Kivrin spoke directly to Dunsworthy, certain that she would die without ever returning home but wanting to make him understand that she regretted nothing, that touched me the most:

I don’t want you to blame yourself for what happened.  I know you would have come to get me if you could, but I couldn’t have gone anyway, not with Agnes ill.

I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.

I loved every single page.