Kivrin walks that wonderfully fine line between being definitely out of her depth, and yet not being helpless either, also she is one of those rare things in a literary novel, someone who cares about the people around her but isn't an overly saintly cliché, a realistically good person we could imagine meeting on the street, yet someone we admire all the same, not the least I admit because she reminds me rather a lot of my lady.ĭunworthy likewise is a wonderfully human character, particularly with his occasional over protectiveness towards Kivrin and his host of dire, if not entirely unjustified fears of what might happen to her in the Middle Ages. This goes very much for the book's main protagonists, Kivrin Engle and James Dunworthy. It is definitely in her character depictions that Willis excels, indeed she often reminded me of a modern day Dickens in the way she is able to draw characters who are both distinctly realistic and three dimensional, quirky and wryly amusing, whether in the thirteenth or twenty first century. Yet, even though Kivrin's experiences begin as confusing and strange, and Willis doesn't shy away from details such as the lack of sanitation and bad teeth prevalent in medieval society, slowly over the course of the book, Kivrin, and we with her begin to know and care about the people she meets, people who are just as real and recognizable as those of the far more familiar near future Oxford Kivrin leaves behind. Despite all her preparation, even down to creating a cover story to explain why a young woman would be alone in a time when most women never went anywhere without servants and attendants, the culture and attitudes of the time are decidedly strange and, given an unfortunate accident when she arrives very threatening, especially after the paternal Dunworthy's dire warnings and fears for Kivrin's safety. To begin with, this is very much the approach Willis takes with the fourteenth century.
Of course, as a Doctor Who fan I'm no stranger to time travel stories, and as the writer Steve Lyons has observed one of the most fascinating things about history from a storytelling perspective is that frequently previous centuries can be just as alien, incomprehensible and dangerous places to visit as any extra terrestrial planet. The story then shuttles back and forth between Kivrin's experiences in the fourteenth century, and modern Oxford where Dunworthy is convinced something has gone wrong with Kivrin's drop back in time, but all efforts to investigate the problem are hampered by an ever more serious outbreak of influenza.
Professor James Dunworthy, a veteran of several trips to the twentieth century reluctantly sees his star pupil Kivrin Engle off to the year thirteen twenty, three hundred years earlier than anyone had previously travelled to study the Middle Ages, a point in time with which she's fascinated. Being Christmas, I decided to read a Christmas themed novel, and me being the decidedly morbid person that I am, I decided to celebrate the festive season with a novel all about plague and pestilence, but (more appropriately for Christmas), a story of courage, suffering and very human frailty, one of my lady's favourites.ĭoomsday book begins in Oxford of 2054, a future in which historians do not just study the past, but use a time travelling device (rather confusingly for modern readers), known as "the net" to travel back in time to view the past directly.
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