The novel “All Clear” by Connie Willis was published for the first time in 2010. Along with “Blackout“, which is the first part of what is actually a two-part novel, it won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards as the best novel of the year.
Michael Davies, Merope Ward, and Polly Churchill are in 1940 for what was supposed to be a research on various events of World War II but something has gone wrong and the portals that were supposed to take them back to 2060 are not opening.
The three historians start thinking that what was considered impossible has happened: they have somehow altered history and as a result are trapped in 1940. In their situation, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid getting caught up in the events of the war and make things worse.
“All Clear” is the second part of a bit novel that started with “Blackout”, so you need to read the first part to understand the protagonists and their situation. An important reference in the first part is in the theory of Dr. Ishiwaka, who believes that time travel has a negative effect on the continuum with progressive damage. Professor James Dunworthy, a recurring character in Connie Willis’ works related to the Oxford time travel department, doesn’t believe that theory but it just seemed like the case of a warning of a possible catastrophe that is not heard.
Actually, Michael Davies starts believing early enough that he has unwillingly interfered with history after being involved in the Dunkirk evacuation and there begins one of the problems of this double novel. Polly Churchill in particular seems determined to convince Michael that there were no changes and her mental masturbations go on indefinitely. Connie Willis could easily have cut a hundred pages if she omitted all those mental masturbations about what, in her own personal judgment, Polly should have said or not said to Michael and Merope and subsequent regrets for what she ended up saying or not saying.
The protagonists’ actions often seem to suffer from a sort of dementia, as they don’t seem to notice what they have right in front of them. That’s a cliché that is usually found in works of not excellent quality and it’s a shame to see it in an otherwise excellent work. One wonders if the continuum influenced the protagonists’ minds leaving them with a limited mental lucidity, also because on various occasions Binnie seems far more clever than people who should be historians trained to work in that historical period.
The length and consequent heaviness of these elements often overshadow what are the strong points of this work. The main one, already present in “Blackout”, is the detailed description of life especially in London during the Blitz period. An important part of the story is about Londoners, ordinary people trying to survive in an extreme situation.
“All Clear” is also linked to other historical events of that period. One part is connected to Bletchley Park, the headquarters of the top-secret intelligence project that led to the cracking of various Nazi secret codes. The British government was so obsessed with the secrecy of that project that it was only after decades that the whole story was made public. One consequence is that the British were at the forefront of computer science with the Colossus computer but at the end of World War II, they destroyed any possibility of development for information technology in the UK by keeping those technologies a secret. In the novel, Alan Turing also appears briefly, a man who has become a legend but was also a victim of the obsession with secrecy.
Connie Willis could very well have written a single book by halving the total length of her work without losing anything of its significant bits. The result would have been a novel with considerable dramatic intensity. If their prolixity doesn’t scare you and boredom doesn’t take over, it’s still worth reading “Blackout” and “All Clear”.
