I'm writing one post for two books because the story is really a single giant novel published in two parts, and I don't think discussing the two parts separately would benefit me or a reader in any way, since I've already finished both of them. So! Here we go.
These books take place in a larger book universe in which time travel has been invented at Oxford University in the mid-twenty-first century, and is used as a means of learning more about historical events by going back in time and essentially observing. The predominant theory is that historians can't make significant changes to history, so they don't need to worry about changing things, just to avoid something calamitous happening to them in the past, because if you die in the past you die in real life, too. In the first book we're introduced to three historians, Michael, Polly and Merope. Merope has an assignment in the English countryside during the Blitz (where she's known as Eileen), when children were sent away from London, Michael is about to go to observe the Dunkirk evacuation, and Polly is going to London itself during the Blitz to work as a shopgirl.
From the very beginning of Blackout the reader is more aware than the characters that something isn't quite right. The way time travel is supposed to work is that there's a drop location in time and place where a person goes when they want to be retrieved by the future again, and for all three of them their drops don't work. They each also get closer to the big inflection point moments of history than they had been taught they would be able to get, and Michael and Polly in particular begin to worry that they've both altered history that they weren't supposed to, and that the reason they can't get home is because they've changed things so much that England no longer wins the war. The book ends with the three of them finding each other in London (which was never a part of their assignment originally).
The second book is more chaos and inability to get home and talking at cross purposes and characters withholding information from each other AND from the reader even when it's in their POV and a couple of big reveals that are either lessened because the reader has realized the truth long before the characters have and/or because the characters really should have been more insightful in general. There's so much about this story that I like, and I enjoyed the setting immensely and Eileen's arc is delightful and the most genuine in my mind, but so much of the tension is from characters behaving in ways that may be understandable but that I found deeply frustrating. The entire story needed to be edited down by about two hundred pages between the two books, in my opinion, and there are aspects of how time travel is supposed to work in this universe that just felt almost unreasonable to me, someone who grew up watching Quantum Leap and has a lot of thoughts and feelings about what people are supposed to be able to change about history and what they're not. These are two books about incredibly high stakes--indeed, what I found the most affecting were the discussions of how many coincidences or quirks of geography resulted in England being able to win the war, and how close it all really was--but I never felt those stakes for the characters themselves, or felt that they truly appreciated what they were doing while they were doing it, and especially before they got trapped in the past. The role of a historian in the universe as described would really be the role of a spy and actor, and none of them seemed to fully appreciate that.
Having said all that, there's another book by the author in the same general Oxford time travel universe that I'm definitely going to read, because while I was quite frustrated by a number of things in these books, I also really enjoyed many aspects of them, and I'm glad I read them. They're the sort of books which are close enough to being great that the flaws are even more frustrating than they would be in a lesser story.
Grade: B
These books take place in a larger book universe in which time travel has been invented at Oxford University in the mid-twenty-first century, and is used as a means of learning more about historical events by going back in time and essentially observing. The predominant theory is that historians can't make significant changes to history, so they don't need to worry about changing things, just to avoid something calamitous happening to them in the past, because if you die in the past you die in real life, too. In the first book we're introduced to three historians, Michael, Polly and Merope. Merope has an assignment in the English countryside during the Blitz (where she's known as Eileen), when children were sent away from London, Michael is about to go to observe the Dunkirk evacuation, and Polly is going to London itself during the Blitz to work as a shopgirl.
From the very beginning of Blackout the reader is more aware than the characters that something isn't quite right. The way time travel is supposed to work is that there's a drop location in time and place where a person goes when they want to be retrieved by the future again, and for all three of them their drops don't work. They each also get closer to the big inflection point moments of history than they had been taught they would be able to get, and Michael and Polly in particular begin to worry that they've both altered history that they weren't supposed to, and that the reason they can't get home is because they've changed things so much that England no longer wins the war. The book ends with the three of them finding each other in London (which was never a part of their assignment originally).
The second book is more chaos and inability to get home and talking at cross purposes and characters withholding information from each other AND from the reader even when it's in their POV and a couple of big reveals that are either lessened because the reader has realized the truth long before the characters have and/or because the characters really should have been more insightful in general. There's so much about this story that I like, and I enjoyed the setting immensely and Eileen's arc is delightful and the most genuine in my mind, but so much of the tension is from characters behaving in ways that may be understandable but that I found deeply frustrating. The entire story needed to be edited down by about two hundred pages between the two books, in my opinion, and there are aspects of how time travel is supposed to work in this universe that just felt almost unreasonable to me, someone who grew up watching Quantum Leap and has a lot of thoughts and feelings about what people are supposed to be able to change about history and what they're not. These are two books about incredibly high stakes--indeed, what I found the most affecting were the discussions of how many coincidences or quirks of geography resulted in England being able to win the war, and how close it all really was--but I never felt those stakes for the characters themselves, or felt that they truly appreciated what they were doing while they were doing it, and especially before they got trapped in the past. The role of a historian in the universe as described would really be the role of a spy and actor, and none of them seemed to fully appreciate that.
Having said all that, there's another book by the author in the same general Oxford time travel universe that I'm definitely going to read, because while I was quite frustrated by a number of things in these books, I also really enjoyed many aspects of them, and I'm glad I read them. They're the sort of books which are close enough to being great that the flaws are even more frustrating than they would be in a lesser story.
Grade: B
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