When I finished Hamnet I was looking for something similarly satisfying. There is a lot of sadness in Hamnet, because it is about a child dying of bubonic plague, but the sadness is embedded in so much goodness. I loved the sense of place, and the illustration of a family grieving together, and the reminder that doing what you are made to do requires time and perseverance (and may never seem reasonable to your parents), and its ideas about how we remember the people we have loved and lost. It was definitely going to be hard to follow. Something deep in my brain said, "Hmm, feel-good books about the Black Death..." (Probably a short list, huh?) Its workings whirred and clicked and spat out...Doomsday Book.
I posted about Doomsday Book when I read it six years ago, but it hits differently in 2022. I had only the vaguest memory that the residents of the Oxford time-travel universe had lived through a capital-P Pandemic in the mid-2010s. Theirs killed 65 million people, which probably earns it the capital P. (Globally COVID-19 deaths are at about 10% of that number right now.)
I was amused (and also impressed!) when I read that the early stages of quarantine in Oxford caused a toilet paper shortage. And one line in particular lands more forcefully this time around. There's a group of American tourists who get pretty shirty (do we say that in American English? or is a British expression springing to my fingertips because I'm writing about Oxford?) about the quarantine restrictions. "In America," one of them huffs, "nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can't go." Mr. Dunworthy says to himself, "And over thirty million Americans died in the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking."
I suppose anytime you read a book set in a future to which you are much closer than the author was, you're going to bump up against oversights. When she wrote in 1992 about a flurry of unsuccessful attempts to reach a university administrator on holiday, Willis did not foresee the world in which I keep muting group texts from my colleagues in a futile attempt to be marginally less reachable. ("Email!" I want to tell them. "This is why we have email! Do not text me about fall syllabi when I am not under contract!") Willis is surprisingly perceptive, though, when she writes about our collective reactions to an unknown and dangerous disease-- the way that fear and uncertainty bring out both the best and the worst in us.
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