Book Review: All Clear, Connie Willis
All Clear by Connie Willis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Ok, so. Connie Willis is a difficult author for me to talk about, because I hate, hate, hate so many of her authorial tricks, but her books worm themselves into my brain whether I'd like them to or not. I hate the circumlocution, I hate plot movement based on people not talking to one another, and I find some of her characters very undifferentiated. Characterization isn't, by and large, one of her strengths - those, I would say, lie more in how she brings you into a moment, arranges circumstances, hits you between the eyes with an emotional wallop that you're powerless to resist.
I did what I knew was the wrong thing, and read Blackout first, ages ago. When I got my hands on All Clear, I plunged into it immediately. It was late at night, my hands were sore from holding the book up as I read in bed, and I was feeling that frustration again...there was so much of it, so much repetition, people struggling to get somewhere only to find that they've missed the person they urgently need to talk to, and then they spend another twenty pages struggling back. It's like being caught in one of my most frequent anxiety dreams, where I'm trying to make a flight but the gate is always in another terminal, I have to pee, and there are people constantly getting in my way. I ended up skipping a chunk of about thirty pages, so I could read the ending. And then I sniffled myself to sleep.
The book (because it is one book, despite being in two volumes) needs to be shorter. I miss the punchy, focused days of Willis' early books. It could be improved in a million different ways, big and small. (Apparently, Brit-picking this book is akin to shooting fish in a bucket.) But she still manages to cock back her arm and deliver that wallop between the eyes, that gets me every time.
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