Blackout
by Connie Willis
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Book Summary Information
Author: Connie WillisEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2010-02-02
ISBN: 0553803190
Number of pages: 512
Publisher: Spectra
Book Reviews of Blackout
Book Review: The Blitz Experience
Summary: 5 Stars
Blackout (2010) is the first SF novel in a duology. This is a time travel story set in Oxford during 2060 and in Warwickshire and London from December 1939.
In this novel, Merope is a historian from Oxford University in 2060. Her assignment is studying children evacuated from London in 1939. She is posing as a maid named Eileen O'Reilly.
Polly Churchill is also a historian at Oxford in 2060. She is currently assigned to London in 1914 to study reactions to the Zeppelin bombings.
Michael Davies is another historian from Oxford in 2060. He is assigned to study the Pearl Harbor raid as an U.S. Navy officer named Mike Davis.
James Dunworthy is head of the Research Lab at Oxford. He is extremely protective of his students.
Colin Templer is a seventeen year old student at Eton. He is also an experienced time traveler, having saved Dunworthy in the Crusades. Unfortunately, he appears unable to wait until he is twenty to resume traveling to the past.
In this story, Michael finds that his schedule has been rearranged. He was assigned a multiple trip study of heroes. Now his trip to Pearl Harbor has been delayed by orders of Dunworthy. Instead, he is going back to Dover in 1940 to study heroes during the Dunkirk evacuation.
Polly comes back from her jaunt to London in 1914 and prepares to go to London in 1940. She will use the surname of Sebastian for the study of shopping in Oxford Street stores during the Blitz. Colin has been doing some research on the bombing sites for her.
Polly will be posing as a sales girl during the study. Her departure times are also rearranged and she cannot find a black skirt at Wardrobe to wear in the role. She leaves wearing a navy blue skirt.
The evacuated children in Warwickshire are being recalled by their parents. Eileen takes Theodore to the train station for his return to London. He really wants to go home until the train arrives and he has to go into a railway car crowded with troops.
Lady Caroline calls for Eileen and announces that they will do their part in the war effort by having Eileen and other servants learn to drive. The training will allow them to drive Lady Caroline's Bentley for duty as an ambulance. Mrs. Bascombe -- the cook -- flatly refuses to take driving lessons from the vicar.
Merope returns to Oxford to learn about twentieth century motorcars. She finds that paperwork is required for such training and she cannot find Dunworthy to give permission. With luck -- and some crucial help from Michael -- she manages to get a short familiarization course in vintage Bentleys.
When Eileen returns to her job at the manor, she finds that she will be learning to drive an Austin. Fortunately, she quickly learns the differences and manages to start, steer and stop the car with only minor difficulties. Unfortunately, Una -- the kitchen maid -- does not have as much luck at learning to drive the car.
Polly travels back to 1940 and is immediately caught in an air raid. She is escorted to the nearest shelter in the basement of a church. After some initial confusion, Polly finds a place to sit and observes the actions of these contemps.
One lady in the shelter even has a room to let. It is small and the food is often atrocious, but it is close to the underground and very near the shelter. Besides, Polly will spend most of her time at work or in the shelter.
Mike Davis has some significant slippage in his jaunt to 1940. He arrives on a beach outside the village of Saltram-on-Sea. Unluckily, he also arrives later than expected and then he cannot find transport to Dover.
The locals send him to Commander Harold for a possible boat for hire. The Commander is eighty-two year old and eagerly awaiting a commission in the Royal Navy. When the Commander drives off to London to talk to the Admiralty, Mike lies down in the Lady Jane to sleep off his time-lag.
Upon awakening, Mike discovers that the Lady Jane is on its way across the Channel to evacuate British troops from Dunkirk. The Commander's great-grandson Jonathan is also aboard. Mike tries to convince the Commander to return to Saltram-on-Sea, but he soon discovers that they are outside Dunkirk harbor.
This tale shows the horrors and humanity of the Battle of Britain. The three historians meet many people, some of whom are killed during the bombings. Then these historians lose contact with the Oxford Lab and begin to feel the same terror as those around them.
The story is more about people than events. During World War II, men, women and children had to live their own lives while terrible things were occurring around them. They were determined to not let fear of the enemy deter them from the joys and sorrows of life.
Eileen has an extreme case of such feelings. Despite the war, her own worst problems are caused by two ragamuffin children evacuated from the London slums. They tease and steal and even set fire to haystacks and, worse yet, they involve other children in these shenanigans. Her main ambition is to return them to their mother before she surrenders to her desire to strangle them.
This story ends with the historians stranded in London. The sequel -- All Clear -- should take up the story where this volume ended. Read and enjoy!
Highly recommended for Willis fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of time travel, wartime society, and frustrated historians.
-Arthur W. Jordin
Summary of Blackout
In her first novel since 2002, Nebula and Hugo award-winning author Connie Willis returns with a stunning, enormously entertaining novel of time travel, war, and the deeds?great and small?of ordinary people who shape history. In the hands of this acclaimed storyteller, the past and future collide?and the result is at once intriguing, elusive, and frightening.Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place. Scores of time-traveling historians are being sent into the past, to destinations including the American Civil War and the attack on the World Trade Center. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser, Mr. Dunworthy, into letting her go to VE Day. Polly Churchill?s next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of London?s Blitz. And seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who has a major crush on Polly, is determined to go to the Crusades so that he can ?catch up? to her in age.
But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments for no apparent reason and switching around everyone?s schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly finally get to World War II, things just get worse. For there they face air raids, blackouts, unexploded bombs, dive-bombing Stukas, rationing, shrapnel, V-1s, and two of the most incorrigible children in all of history?to say nothing of a growing feeling that not only their assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling out of control. Because suddenly the once-reliable mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches, and our heroes are beginning to question their most firmly held belief: that no historian can possibly change the past.
From the people sheltering in the tube stations of London to the retired sailors who set off across the Channel to rescue the stranded British Army from Dunkirk, from shopgirls to ambulance drivers, from spies to hospital nurses to Shakespearean actors, Blackout reveals a side of World War II seldom seen before: a dangerous, desperate world in which there are no civilians and in which everybody?from the Queen down to the lowliest barmaid?is determined to do their bit to help a beleaguered nation survive.
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