Blackout

Connie Willis’s Blackout begins with historians from the future doing what historians have always secretly wanted to do: stop squinting at footnotes and go and stand directly in the mess. Oxford time travellers are sent back into the Second World War to observe events first-hand, which sounds wonderfully scholarly until the Blitz begins, the schedules wobble, the exits misbehave, and everyone remembers that “primary source research” is less charming when bombs are falling on the reading room.

The premise is deliciously unfair to the profession. Instead of arguing over diaries and ration books, the historians are in wartime Britain itself: London during the Blitz, Dunkirk, evacuation, air raids, blackouts, shelters, queues, fear, fatigue, tea, confusion, and the national talent for carrying on while absolutely everything is on fire or late. The future may have invented time travel, but Britain has invented bureaucracy, weather and transport delays, so really it is not obvious who has the upper hand.

Willis has great fun with the practical terror of historical fieldwork. A missed rendezvous is not just inconvenient; it may mean being stranded in 1940 with no sensible way back and an increasing suspicion that the past is not behaving like a museum exhibit. The historians know what is supposed to happen, which turns out to be less comforting than expected. Knowing the broad shape of history is one thing. Knowing whether you personally are about to be crushed by it is another.

The irony of Blackout is that the past, so neat in textbooks, becomes alarmingly crowded once entered. There are children to evacuate, patients to help, strangers to protect, shelters to find, trains to catch, bombs to avoid, and ordinary people refusing to be mere background colour for someone else’s research project. History is not a corridor with labels. It is smoke, noise, mud, duty, error, luck, and a great many people trying to do the next necessary thing.

This is science fiction in sensible shoes and a gas mask: time travel without the usual swagger, wartime drama without the bunting, and historical fiction with the added nuisance that some of the characters know too much and not nearly enough. Willis folds the big machinery of time paradox into the very human machinery of wartime endurance, where courage is often less a speech than a cup of tea, a bandage, a night shift, or standing in a queue while civilisation coughs plaster dust.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid Gollancz time-travel war volume, ready to be posted from the present into whatever shelf requires historians, air raids, misplaced confidence and the unsettling possibility that the past has not finished with anyone yet.

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