![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Okay, I'm on a Connie Willis binge. I had held off reading her for a long time out of sheer superstitious fear, because my agent once made the mistake of remarking that my writing reminded him of hers. But I finally just read (for the first time) The Doomsday Book and Lincoln's Dreams. I have read some of her short stories--"The Last of the Winnebagos" and "At the Rialto" in particular spring to mind. (It turns out that my uneasiness was needless. Whatever it was that my agent saw in similarity between her work and mine is perfectly opaque to me.)
I'll review these books in greater detail in my book list at the end of the month. I want to mull them over a bit first. But was struck me most on first impression was that I could certainly see that it was the author of "At the Rialto" who wrote The Doomsday Book, particularly in the modern era section.
The other was to marvel at how she keeps using as a plot device again and again the idea of a message being imperfectly conveyed. The message is muddled, or maddeningly repeated in all sorts of reiterations, and the listener is left wondering what it all means. I was struck by how often in those works the protagonist was listening to answering machine messages, furious that he'd missed the call he wanted, or ducking somebody's calls that he wanted to avoid. Including, oddly enough, in Oxford in 2058--she needs to use this as a plot device so much that she does not take cell phones into account at all. Much of the conversation with secondary characters takes place because messages are being passed on--or the secondary character is explaining why the protagonist cannot speak with the person he desperately needs to see.
Discuss, if you like.
Edited to add: Okay, now that I think about it, the similarities between The Doomsday Book and The Wild Swans are certainly there. Plague, and double time alternating chapter structure. Duh.
I'll review these books in greater detail in my book list at the end of the month. I want to mull them over a bit first. But was struck me most on first impression was that I could certainly see that it was the author of "At the Rialto" who wrote The Doomsday Book, particularly in the modern era section.
The other was to marvel at how she keeps using as a plot device again and again the idea of a message being imperfectly conveyed. The message is muddled, or maddeningly repeated in all sorts of reiterations, and the listener is left wondering what it all means. I was struck by how often in those works the protagonist was listening to answering machine messages, furious that he'd missed the call he wanted, or ducking somebody's calls that he wanted to avoid. Including, oddly enough, in Oxford in 2058--she needs to use this as a plot device so much that she does not take cell phones into account at all. Much of the conversation with secondary characters takes place because messages are being passed on--or the secondary character is explaining why the protagonist cannot speak with the person he desperately needs to see.
Discuss, if you like.
Edited to add: Okay, now that I think about it, the similarities between The Doomsday Book and The Wild Swans are certainly there. Plague, and double time alternating chapter structure. Duh.