This governs how people react in time of crisis. Willis creates a North American vision of future England and past England. Nearly thirty years after Doomsday Book was first released, this is far easier to see than when the novel was first released. This suggests (strongly) that Willis uses her own background to ground her development of the concept of how individuals handle difficult times. Her England is more like the current US in the way it handles the influenza outbreak than it is like the way the UK is handling things, though there is overlap. Her novel is a perfect little microcosm of period assumptions and gives an insight into how she sees societies functioning. Besides, I’m here to talk about the Middle Ages as we read them in fiction.Įxcept… the most profound aspects of this novel often involve how she thinks a future society would deal with a virus such as the one we have among us now, and how people in the fourteenth century actually handled it. I won’t talk about how different her plague and epidemic are to our current pandemic – that’s another analysis entirely. When she is sent to the Middle Ages, an influenza epidemic has broken out in her time. Kivrin Engle is a scholar who investigates history through travelling to the place and time she is researching. The premise of the story is one of time travel gone very slightly awry, with devastating consequences. Through it, we discover the relationships between people and the relationships of those people with the world around them.

Willis’ dialogue is critical to her presentation of the Middle Ages.

Doomsday book by connie willis