What: Blackout and All Clear, by Connie Willis, are two volumes of a single story. Well, it's actually a multi-story --- a 1,132-page epic --- complete with time-jumping and -sliding, with layers of characters, with bombs and tanks and tube shelters.
It's a lot to take in, I know. Here are some coping strategies:
- If you are the type of person who gets paranoid about getting to places on time, resign yourself early on to a constant thrum of low-level anxiety.
- Make a simple timeline for yourself so you can mark which characters are where when during the war. I suggest a frame of bimonthly intervals from December 1939 through June 1945, but you do you.
- Have All Clear ready and waiting for you as soon as you finish Blackout. It is one continuous story and taking a break in between the volumes is not going to feel right.
- Make a simple timeline for yourself. Seriously. I cannot stress this enough. Everything will make so much more sense.
- You will get to a scene fairly early on where characters from The Importance of Being Earnest are blowing up tanks. It is a really great scene.
Representative chapter headers:
"Look Out in the Blackout!"--- British government poster, 1939
Oxford, April 2060
"Do not tell the enemy anything. Hide your food and your bicycles. Hide your maps." --- Public information booklet, 1940
London, November 1940
"Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel,/ And piece together the past and the future" --- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Imperial War Museum, London, 7 May 1995
How to get it/them: Buyable, borrowable, Kindle-able.
Connections to previous Wreckage: Part of Personal Wreck #5 and Gift Idea #1.
Connie Willis also wrote All About Emily (Rec. #266), Bellwether (Rec. #218), Lincoln's Dreams (Rec. #248), and To Say Nothing of the Dog (Rec. #100).
[I love To Say Nothing of the Dog so much that I flail when I talk about it.]
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