Connie Willis is one of those authors that Hugo voters love. I'm not among them. The main plot of the book concerns an ill-fated effort to do history via time travel at 21st century Oxford University. Kivrin, a driven undergraduate, has bamboozled the faculty into letting her be the first time traveler to visit the 14th century. She's fully prepared, with training in Middle English and Latin, a hopped-up immune system, a plausible alibi for a young woman travelling along, and an implanted translator and recorder to take field notes in her two week expedition. Unfortunately, the University isn't. She's going over break with a skeleton staff operating the time machine and an idiot as Acting Head of History who doesn't understand the first thing about time travel paradoxes. Which is bad, because instead of relatively safe 1320, she's been dumped in 1348, the year the Black Death came to England. When a sudden flu strikes modern Oxford, it's up to the only sane man in the asylum, Mr. Dunworthy, to figure out how to save Kivrin against a backdrop of chaos and quarentine.

The two stories are told in parallel; disease in the near future and disease in the distant past. Quarantine, sick bed, and human decency in the face of the end of the world are the common themes that bind the story together. There are two major problems with the book. The first is that it is repetitive and frankly boring. A solid half of the book is taken up with games of telephone tag (cellphones have been abandoned, an anachronism which has not aged well) or conversations where one side is delusional. Characters spend a lot of time waiting for people who never arrive. Jokes about the pettiness and shortsightedness of everybody around Dunworthy quickly wear out their welcome and yet hang around. The last fifty pages or so is quite gripping, but if I weren't reading this book for the project, I would have given up ages ago.

The second, and more important flaw, is that it is banal. The most obvious literary antecedent is Cumus's The Plague, which I read ages ago, but which I remember as a gripping existential tale about what people do under conditions of random danger, and about how the structures of order break down under pressure. The characters of Doomsday Book are so flat, defined mostly by a very British decency, that they never really do anything interesting. They keep going until they fall over from exhaustion, they rest, they get back up. The main characters of Kivrin and Dunworthy are basically competent pragmatists. The supporting cast of perky kids and various flavors of monomaniacs don't have enough emotional death to do anything except live (or mostly die) as the fates demand.

Maybe there's something in the novel about the history that we don't know people no one was alive to tell it, or an existential point like in Camus or some absurdism like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but that's generous. This novel is nowhere near interesting or bold enough to deserve its generosity. It's shameful, because there is an interesting novel about history becoming observational rather than interpretive, defined by access to time travel rather than documents, about being in the past without paradox, witnessing without being witnessed, and surviving horrific events, and at every turn Willis makes the most boring choice.