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Well, maybe God himself is lost and needs help
I am not sleeping again. It makes me rather useless as far as intelligent conversation is concerned. Of course, the dimension of Connie Willis' Doomsday Book (1992) that interests me most is the one I feel least qualified to talk about anyway: the theological patterning. In the apocalyptic plague winter of 1348, Kivrin is surrounded by people asking the immemorial question of God in the midst of death, horror, devastation: where are you? (?און איך זוך: װוּ ביסטו, װוּ) She has no answers for them, except the terrible statistics of the century—she's a misplaced time traveler, her chances of going home as inaccessible to her as the mind of God.1 On the other side of the time net, meanwhile, in a near-future Oxford paralyzed by pandemic flu, one of the professors responsible becomes convinced of the poignant, heretical notion that maybe God didn't forsake Christ after all; maybe he only couldn't save him.
God didn't know where His Son was, Dunworthy thought. He had sent His only begotten Son into the world, and something had gone wrong with the fix, someone had turned off the net, so that He couldn't get to him, and they had arrested him and put a crown of thorns on his head and nailed him to a cross.
It's a startling, obvious parallel—Kivrin is the sacrifice of her department and it resonates especially with the novel's Christmastime setting, season of sendings and wonders and the bitter perfume of myrrh under the incense and the gold—but I've seen other fiction quote Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, and never from the God-side. Dunworthy isn't infallible, of course. He's an aging Oxford don whose glasses fog up at the slightest change of atmosphere, so that he's constantly wiping them off on his scarf.2 He's not even Kivrin's advisor; he tutored her to score points off a rival and regretted it almost instantly, but couldn't bring himself to leave her half-trained even for a disaster in the making. He's almost painfully conscientious. And he's determined to do what God couldn't: rescue the beloved child he sent, knowing or unknowing, into the hell of the world. What I want to know is what it means that he succeeds. He goes back to 1348 for Kivrin. He finds her. And it is not too late. There's nothing of God in this, though she was taken for an saint; this is what people do, feverish and foolhardy as they are. Kivrin's faith in her teacher is rewarded: "It's strange. When I couldn't find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death or seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute . . . I knew you'd come." Except for the priest who dies believing she was sent to ease their dying, who with his last, strangling breath calls himself the most blessed of men in her arms, no one else's is. Och när Lammet bröt det sjunde inseglet uppstod i himlen en tystnad, som varade vid pass en halv timme.
I will now read To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997) and it will be completely different.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
schreibergasse, do you curse one of the ways you do because of this series?
1. Somewhat to my surprise, this book clicked with me. One of the reasons may be that it could very easily function as a medieval update of L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall (1941), with Kivrin's twenty-first-century university education serving to ward off the plague and alter the course of at least a few lives in a small manor village; and it's not. She knows what spreads the plague, but not how to halt it. She doesn't have antibiotics or IVs. She has fire and boiling wine and a knife. In the end, all she can do is very simple, very human: hold the dying and bury the dead. This goes, for me, a long way toward making up for the vaguer aspects of the worldbuilding, like the fact that Willis' 2054 Oxford feels less modern than the novel's publication date.
2. Probably for this reason, even though Dunworthy is never described beyond his wire-rims and his arthritis and could be a rare chromatic protagonist for all I know, apparently I envision him played by Alec Guinness circa George Smiley.
God didn't know where His Son was, Dunworthy thought. He had sent His only begotten Son into the world, and something had gone wrong with the fix, someone had turned off the net, so that He couldn't get to him, and they had arrested him and put a crown of thorns on his head and nailed him to a cross.
It's a startling, obvious parallel—Kivrin is the sacrifice of her department and it resonates especially with the novel's Christmastime setting, season of sendings and wonders and the bitter perfume of myrrh under the incense and the gold—but I've seen other fiction quote Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, and never from the God-side. Dunworthy isn't infallible, of course. He's an aging Oxford don whose glasses fog up at the slightest change of atmosphere, so that he's constantly wiping them off on his scarf.2 He's not even Kivrin's advisor; he tutored her to score points off a rival and regretted it almost instantly, but couldn't bring himself to leave her half-trained even for a disaster in the making. He's almost painfully conscientious. And he's determined to do what God couldn't: rescue the beloved child he sent, knowing or unknowing, into the hell of the world. What I want to know is what it means that he succeeds. He goes back to 1348 for Kivrin. He finds her. And it is not too late. There's nothing of God in this, though she was taken for an saint; this is what people do, feverish and foolhardy as they are. Kivrin's faith in her teacher is rewarded: "It's strange. When I couldn't find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death or seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute . . . I knew you'd come." Except for the priest who dies believing she was sent to ease their dying, who with his last, strangling breath calls himself the most blessed of men in her arms, no one else's is. Och när Lammet bröt det sjunde inseglet uppstod i himlen en tystnad, som varade vid pass en halv timme.
I will now read To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997) and it will be completely different.
schreibergasse, do you curse one of the ways you do because of this series?1. Somewhat to my surprise, this book clicked with me. One of the reasons may be that it could very easily function as a medieval update of L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall (1941), with Kivrin's twenty-first-century university education serving to ward off the plague and alter the course of at least a few lives in a small manor village; and it's not. She knows what spreads the plague, but not how to halt it. She doesn't have antibiotics or IVs. She has fire and boiling wine and a knife. In the end, all she can do is very simple, very human: hold the dying and bury the dead. This goes, for me, a long way toward making up for the vaguer aspects of the worldbuilding, like the fact that Willis' 2054 Oxford feels less modern than the novel's publication date.
2. Probably for this reason, even though Dunworthy is never described beyond his wire-rims and his arthritis and could be a rare chromatic protagonist for all I know, apparently I envision him played by Alec Guinness circa George Smiley.
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I think this stayed fairly coherent. I wish I hadn't had to bail at 11:00; I could have bored you to sleep.
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Sutzkeyver, I hope.
I think this stayed fairly coherent.
Oh, well, that's good. I haven't really slept since then, either.
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On the sleep: holy mother of carp in the bathtub.
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I personally found To Say Nothing of the Dog under-researched and a bit twee, even if the concept is interesting. But your experience may be different.
So sorry about insomnia redux.
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One of the secondary characters says "Blood!" a lot. Thought I'd check.
So sorry about insomnia redux.
Thanks.
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Not as forgetfulness but gift
not as sleep but second sight -
come and from my eyelids lift
the dead of night.
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the dead of night.
I had forgotten that, though I love the play. ("If God is God, he is not good . . .") Thank you.
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No, that is powerful; and it makes clear what Kivrin's part in the pattern is. But I have seen before characters who bear witness to history, and rarely the characters who worry about them from the outside.
(Also I did not want to quote the entire last chapter of the book . . .)
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Thank you. He came to mind very early on.
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No! Fascinating.
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Right; this may produce an essay, but what's wrong with it?
Your parallel makes a great deal of sense to me; thanks.
You're welcome. Thank you.
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That is entirely fair. I mostly gave the book a pass on the grounds of terrifying and unprecedented crisis, but the one professor who can't be found for the duration of the epidemic because he's on a fishing vacation? Yeah.
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I hope you enjoy To Say Nothing of the Dog. There's a brief scene takes place in the Middle Ages, which I found rather enjoyable.
*A serial killer apparently believes Manannán is telling him to murder Filipina domestic workers and dump their bodies into Dublin Bay.
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Good grief.
Doomsday Book takes place in two simultaneous, centuries-separated plague years; you can probably figure out if it's a grimness level you can handle right now.
PS
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http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/firewatch.htm
Also before TSNOTD, Jerome K Jerome's "Two Men in a Boat" if you haven't already read it.
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No apologies necessary; I have read "Fire Watch." It was my introduction to Connie Willis; for years it was the only story of hers I liked. (I didn't realize she'd written Remake (1995), which I don't believe takes place in the same timeline.) I was very fond of that website before it closed.
Also before TSNOTD, Jerome K Jerome's "Two Men in a Boat" if you haven't already read it.
We're still good!
Thank you, though.