“…his spectacles promptly steamed up.”
Io suuicien lui damo amo
–You are here in place of the friends I love
- Doomsday Book
D’ya remember, Doomsday Book, when I declared you had me at, “Mr. Dunworthy opened the door to the laboratory and his spectacles promptly steamed up.”?
Well, you did and you still do and I suspect you’ll haunt me for a long time and that’s perfectly okay with me. I’m still haunted by books I read so long ago that it’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly and intelligently what about them still haunts me to this day. The chief culprit is Valerie Anand, who was the author of a series of historical novels set in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. And as much as I’m a sucker for companions and their sass, I’m also a sucker for historical novels set in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Another culprit is one Diana Gabaldon, though I gave up on her probably about five books into the Outlander series and honestly have never returned for the emotional distress they brought me. If “Doomsday Book” broke my heart in seventeen places by the end of the story, then what I read of the Outlander series very nearly ripped my heart from my chest and trampled on it.
But whereas Connie Willis (author of “Doomsday Book”) and Diana Gabaldon broke and trampled my heart until there were tears streaming down my face, Valerie Anand did not, at least not that I can remember. Her words reached me in a place where nothing she wrote seemed a fictional tale spun round real-life events, but was more a glimpse of something I’d known…something I knew, somewhere in myself as real as the job I had that summer I was reading her books and of the longing to return to college and my friends,
- Doomsday Book
but as nebulous as memories of my childhood I know I don’t have but think I do because they’ve been told to me so many times over my lifetime.
Like walking out of the shopping center in the dead of winter, aged two and wearing a bright red snowsuit, then finding a tree to sit under…on the other side of the parking lot. Do I remember that? Hell, no. Do I think I remember it? Of course.
Nothing I read by Anand came as a surprise to me that season and that alone is enough to haunt me. I don’t recall that happening so much from the Outlander series (though there were plenty of moments where my heart felt ready to burst from the story), though it did happen in parts of “Doomsday Book.” What “Doomsday Book” left marked on my heart most strongly was Kivrin’s realization the family who had taken her in and healed her had been dead for seven hundred years by the time she began her studies to travel back into the past and how much of an impact they made on her.
And as much as it tore at my heart, the book also made me laugh, with its gentle, telling bits of humor and knowing observations of even the most mundane things, such as Mr. Dunworthy realizing he hadn’t been in hospital too terribly long since Colin’s omnipresent and usually plucked-from-his-pocket gobstopper was still in his (Colin’s) mouth.
I’ve got until Sunday to marshal my thoughts on “Doomsday Book;” it was my choice for the bookclub and as such, it’s my bookclub meeting to lead. Isn’t it enough I’m serving the main course, that I have to lead the discussion, too? And without the aid of those seemingly ubiquitous questions you find in most books these days which can at least help in these situations, I’d like to mention.
I probably should have picked something Oprah recommended, if reading questions were so important, since I suspect many of her choices do have such things, then. But that wouldn’t do, would it?
Nah, I didn’t think so.
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The thing that has always struck me about Doomsday Book is how well structured it is – with most of the future characters having counterparts in the past. That should be worth a fair amount of discussion. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)
That’s an interesting premise – I hadn’t noticed so much, but now that I think about it, it’s pretty obvious. I was struck by the use of Scripture in general and specifically how Dunworthy caught on passages about God sending Jesus back and abandoning him, perhaps because He couldn’t get a fix on him, very much like what had happened to Kivrin.
And the bells! The bells tying so much of the story together worked quite well, too. =)
I just like the title. FuckyeahDoomsdayBook!
Yeah, I’m kinda fond of the title myself. I’d hoped to see a copy of the Domesday Book when I was in London, but I was content with the Magna Carta. =)