This was my first Connie Willis novel, and I picked it up because it recently won both the Hugo and Nebula Award for best novel. Not knowing what to expect, I must say that the story was at first very hard to follow. So many characters are introduced to you throughout the entire 1000-page mammoth -- it’s hard to decide at any given moment which ones you should try to remember or not. The novel tells the story of historians from a futuristic Oxford University who travel back to the WWII to do research, but are then stuck in this time because of their return “drops” to the future malfunctioning. Throughout the novel, we are following our main characters in different chronological time zones throughout WWII as they are trying to solve the mystery of why their return drops are failing while carefully trying to avoid altering history. Sounds dull? Well, in principle the story might sound dull, but it is told with such a riveting Da Vinci Code-style fashion that I have already decided half-way through the novel, that this is probably going to be one of my favorite SciFi novels of all time.
You see, there are simple time travel stories that you can explain to someone in a few seconds (Christmas Carol) and there are complex time travel stories that require drawing a graph or two (Star Trek’s Yesterday’s Enterprise or Back to the Future Part II). Well, this time travel novel takes it to the extreme. Since the story is told from a multitude of characters from different chronological areas (or shall I say eras?), you sometimes know the effect before reading the cause, while some incident overlap but are just told from different perspectives. The story is told in an nonlinear fashion but miraculously avoids annoying the user. I do recommend keeping a pen and paper handy though to draw your little time charts. ;-)
The other thing I love so much about this book is an eye-opener to the atmosphere of Britain during the nine months that Hitler was dropping bombs over London (the Blitz). As our protagonists travel throughout Britain or hide in bomb shelters in London during this period, we learn so much about the daily lives of so many ordinary citizens during wartime, unsung heros, and interesting tidbits of war strategies. I ended up having to look up so many Wikipedia articles to find out whether this was fiction or what really happened. It is quite educating and vivid.
So step aside, Ender’s Game, I think I found my new favorite novel.