And since you’re never really in doubt that this is how things will end, the historians’ angst over their predicament and their anxiety over how they’ve impacted the contemps (‘contemporaries’ though if you add a ‘t’ in there it gives a pretty accurate idea of how the historians sometimes condescend to their new friends and work mates) seems tiresome rather than tense. Satisfactory enough, I suppose, but still disappointing. The fates of the three main characters are exactly what you could have predicted them to be half way (perhaps even earlier than that) through the first book. She rambles on and on, seemingly determined to beat the reader into boredom with repetitive allusions to the works of Shakespeare and Agatha Christie, and is, in short, in need of a strict editor. I want Willis to be a more skilled writer than she is, I want her to be sparkling where she is dull, succinct where she is verbose.

I kept willing it to get better, to do something, anything, to surprise me but it never did. I stayed up on midnight on Tuesday to finish reading it but, I have to say, it was not a worthwhile sacrifice. I could sit there after finishing the last page with my mind racing through all the possibilities, hoping beyond hope that, like Willis’ adored Agatha Christie (and yes, even Agatha Christie references get tiring after the first half dozen or so), she was planning to masterfully steer the story in a novel direction that would amaze and reward her readers.Īll Clear was hugely disappointing. When I finished it, I at least had the hope that Willis would concoct an unexpected conclusion, that she would develop the characters, that something wonderful would happen. The writing and plotting is no better or worse than All Clear but it is more exciting to read. Of the two books ( Blackout and All Clear), I far preferred Blackout. More than anything, Willis’ books frustrate me: there is so much there, so many ideas that could progress in so many interesting ways, and yet she never quite elevates her material to where it needs to go. The books are competently if unexcitingly written with characters who tend towards the obnoxious (being all-knowing historians who like to frequently – far too frequently – reference their detailed knowledge of wartime England) but inoffensive, with plots that seem promising but which never deliver. If they were simply bad I think I would have an easier time reviewing them but there’s nothing glaringly awful in them. After years of hearing how great her books were and of being intrigued by her time-travelling historians I finally started reading them, beginning earlier this year with To Say Nothing of the Dog and continuing on earlier this month with Blackout and All Clear, her two-volume World War II saga published last year. It is my sad duty to inform everyone that I am officially not a Connie Willis fan, a revelation that is quite a disappointment to me.

All clear novel