THE ZONE has my joint review of Willis’s Blackout and All Clear. As you may gather, I hated both books (though I think that All Clear is a better book, if only because it contains a bit more actual plot). I have reviewed both books together not because they constitute a series as such but because they were written as a single novel and released as two separate books in a move that I can only describe as ‘taking the piss’.
Aside from the books’ terrible characterisation and dreadful plotting, what really annoyed me about them was their attitude towards the past. An attitude that is scientifically illiterate at best and politically reactionary at worse. If you want to read a book that is set in 1940s Britain that reflects a vibrant and living culture that is profoundly relevant to the concerns of the present then I would suggest that you check out either Jo Walton’s Small Change series starting with Farthing (2006) or A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986) by Barbara Vine (a.k.a. Ruth Rendell). Both of those books manage to balance the needs of plot, characterisation and historical detail with a deep engagement with the social and political forces that underpin both the present and the past (a link that serves to preserve the continued vibrancy and relevance of the 1940s).
P.S. – In my review, I credit Willis with having conducted “extensive and painstaking research”. What this remark referred to was her attention to such historical details as when places were bombed and when certain events took place in the war. However, as someone who has lived his entire life in London, I spent most of my time with the novels scaling the walls of an uncanny valley, painfully aware of the ways in which Willis’s London failed to mesh with my experience of the town.
For example, at one point, one of the characters is looking for a room to rent in Kensington and she mentions that the nearest tube station for Kensington is Marble Arch. Except that it isn’t. Not even close. Marble Arch and Kensington are literally on diagonally opposite sides of Hyde Park. Another event that had me scratching my head takes place about halfway through Blackout when one of the characters stumbles into a public bomb shelter. Disoriented and unsure as to the dates and times of a particular event, the character picks up a seemingly abandoned newspaper that is lying on the bench and begins frantically leafing through it. However, this newspaper turns out to belong to someone in the shelter and that person gets quite aggrieved by the impertinence of someone picking up their newspaper. This struck me as utterly unbelievable because, as anyone who has traveled on a tube in London can probably attest, Londoners tend to treat newspapers as public property once they have been put down by the person who first picked them up. Sit in a tube carriage and you will see dozens of newspapers passing happily from person to person. This attitude to newspapers may well not have existed in the 1940s but, as a Londoner, it struck me as utterly unbelievable that someone would get annoyed just because someone picked up their discarded newspaper.
I mention these moments of historical cognitive dissonance because Nick Honeywell was kind enough to email me links to a couple of blog posts that point not just to a few anachronisms but a much wider pattern of sloppy research spreading throughout the books. This begs a question of Willis’s writing: If you can’t do characters, can’t do plot, can’t do subtext and struggle both with scientific ideas and historical ones, then what are you doing writing historical science fiction? An even bigger question is what the relevant people were thinking when they listed Blackout and All Clear as one of the seventeen most significant science fiction novels of 2010.
Filed under: Books, Science Fiction
