Weekend Deviation – A Bit More Blitz – Connie Willis’s All Clear and Time Travel

I’ve confessed to a penchant for time travel before – and also for Connie Willis’s smart time travel books. I raved about her book Blackout previously, a great and well researched story about London during the Blitz and time travellers getting stuck in the middle of it all. In Blackout Willis really captured the atmosphere on London in late 1940 and now she’s trumped herself in the follow up to Blackout, All Clear in which she carries on the story of the Blitz but also weaves in D-Day and VE Day too! Again, the observations, detail and atmosphere are all great. I’m now a confirmed fan of Willis and she certainly made my Christmas week reading gripping. Blurb and cover below as usual and a recommendation for those who like time travel stuff.

In Blackout, award-winning author Connie Willis returned to the time-traveling future of 2060—the setting for several of her most celebrated works—and sent three Oxford historians to World War II England: Michael Davies, intent on observing heroism during the Miracle of Dunkirk; Merope Ward, studying children evacuated from London; and Polly Churchill, posing as a shopgirl in the middle of the Blitz. But when the three become unexpectedly trapped in 1940, they struggle not only to find their way home but to survive as Hitler’s bombers attempt to pummel London into submission.

Now the situation has grown even more dire. Small discrepancies in the historical record seem to indicate that one or all of them have somehow affected the past, changing the outcome of the war. The belief that the past can be observed but never altered has always been a core belief of time-travel theory—but suddenly it seems that the theory is horribly, tragically wrong.

Meanwhile, in 2060 Oxford, the historians’ supervisor, Mr. Dunworthy, and seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who nurses a powerful crush on Polly, are engaged in a frantic and seemingly impossible struggle of their own—to find three missing needles in the haystack of history.

Told with compassion, humor, and an artistry both uplifting and devastating, All Clear is more than just the triumphant culmination of the adventure that began with Blackout. It’s Connie Willis’s most humane, heartfelt novel yet—a clear-eyed celebration of faith, love, and the quiet, ordinary acts of heroism and sacrifice too often overlooked by history.

NB:

Watch out this February for Matthew Flaming’s The Kingdom of Ohio – which blends turn of the century New York, some fictional American history, Edison, JP Morgan and Tesla as well as a bit of time travel.