I’ve been in Holland.

Well, strictly speaking, since it was on the borders of the Friesland and Groningen provinces, make that The Netherlands.

The good lady’s eldest brother lives there. We had been supposed to visit for years but life got in the way.

We needed to renew our passports first. I sent the applications away late in July. Despite all the talk on the news about delays we got the new ones inside a week. (As I remember it was four days.) Maybe the Glasgow Passport office is more efficient than down south.

So another country visited. Apart from the constituent parts of the UK (though I only just made it into Wales) I’ve been to Sweden (Stockholm,) the Soviet Union (Leningrad as was) and Denmark (Copenhagen) on a school cruise when I was at Primary School, Portugal (the Azores, Madeira, Lisbon) and Spain (Vigo) on a Secondary School cruise, and as an adult to Germany (near Stuttgart) and France twice (Normandy for the D-Day beaches and Picardy for World War I battlefields.)

Since the good lady didn’t fancy being on a RoRo ferry overnight we drove down to Harwich (with an overnight stop) and the same on the way back. I’m knackered.

Gollancz, 2012, 792 p

Warning: the book is a time travel story. It is difficult to discuss without getting ahead of (behind?) yourself. The following may contain spoilers.

This is the continuation of Blackout. Had I not read All Clear so soon after I would have put it off for a long time which could have been a problem as little concession is made to anyone who by chance hasn’t read the first book of the pair. We plunge into the story with no preamble.

Our historian heroines/hero, time travelling from 2060 Oxford, are still stuck in 1940, either unable to get to their drops or waiting in vain for them to open, and still worrying that they have changed history for the worse and will not be able to get back to their own time before the continuum exacts its revenge. Polly Sebastian in particular is up against a deadline, having been dropped earlier in her own time to later in the war and the “laws of time travel” do not allow her to overlap time frames. All of the historians have in one way or another saved the lives of “contemps” and two of them have prevented fires spreading in St Paul’s Cathedral. One even travels to Bletchley Park where he (literally) bumps into Alan Turing and later becomes a vital part of the effort to convince the Germans the D-Day landings will be in the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy. Meanwhile in 1944 Mary hasn’t been killed by a doodlebug but she has gone on to inspire an RAF pilot to develop the “flipping” technique used to deflect their paths. As Polly, dropped into 1940, she therefore knows she has already affected later history yet is nevertheless the main worrier.

There is more Science Fictional stuff revealed in All Clear than there was in Blackout, which makes the nomination for the 2011 Hugo at least understandable (but not forgiveable;) the working out of the plot is neat enough – though there is at least one loose end – and Willis’s prose is never difficult to read. Aspects of her digression/interruption technique are essential to the plot but she lays it on with a trowel and also uses it in other circumstances – without it the book may have been considerably shorter.

Polly eventually comes to understand the true situation – but it has been a long time coming. It’s also a realisation that had occurred to the reader less than a quarter of the way through Blackout, ie approximately 1000 pages earlier. In addition these Oxford historians do seem to have an alarming lack of knowledge of wider history beyond the “prepping” they have done for their drops. (But then, “What ten year period did you study?” was always a jibe directed at history graduates.)

Given the number of bombs and explosions the characters have to endure, the levels of destruction we are shown, it is a matter of wonder that any of London managed to survive the war. However, Willis’s point that the ambulance drivers, rescue workers, ARP wardens, shopgirls, etc were no less heroic and no less important to winning the war than the fighting forces is well made. One of the reasons for carrying on though (apart from sheer bloody-mindedness, a prime motivator for the British in continuing to oppose Hitler) is what else can you do? The alternative is to despair, to give up, to give in. “Up yours!” is surely a healthier response. And these days there is no such thing as a civilian – we are all targets. Ever since the invention of the aeroplane and the submarine it has no longer been possible to outsource the risk of warfare purely to the armed services. (There are perhaps thousands of examples to argue that it actually never has.)

The most flagrant example in this volume of Willis’s lack of knowledge/research over things British is that she has one of her characters pay for an item in the 1940s using a tuppence (2^d) piece. Prior to decimalisation in 1971 (when the face values changed in any case) there was no such coin. The denominations available in the 1940s were ¼^d, ½^d, 1^d, 3^d, 6^d, 12^d (1/-,) 24^d (2/-,) or 30^d (2/6) and, in extreme cases, 60^d (5/-) but never 2^d. Neither was two half-crowns (total 5/-) enough to cover two tickets at eight and six (8/6.) I’m also fairly sure that no London shops would have been open on Boxing Day 1940 given that it would have been a bank (and therefore public) holiday in England. Another example of her lack of feel for the minutiae of British life is that she doesn’t seem to appreciate how utterly unlikely it would be for someone of poverty-stricken childhood circumstances ever to make it into the highest echelons of the legal profession (to enter it at all, in fact.)

Gollancz, 2012, 611 p

Why does Willis have a fascination with the 1940s Britain of the Second World War? One of her most celebrated short stories, Fire Watch, is about the preservation of St Paul’s from destruction in the Blitz, To Say Nothing of the Dog relied on the bombing of Coventry Cathedral for its plot motor and now we have a whole novel (split into two parts – I still have All Clear to come) devoted to the subject. (There are scenes set in the similarly troubled London of 1944 under doodlebug bombardment but these end when one of the characters is apparently hit by a V1 and we are thereafter firmly stuck in 1940.) Fair enough, Pearl Harbor, D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge get mentions but you’d have thought a USian would have been more interested in these scenarios – or the Pacific War. Or is it that the details of those would be more familiar to her core US readership and she thinks she can busk it here? I certainly wasn’t convinced that life during the Blitz was anything like Willis describes it here.

As to details, the back cover puff from the Washington Post “every detail rings true” raises a hollow laugh in a British reader; for the details are what consistently hit wrong notes. For example, we hang out the washing, not the laundry – hanging out a building where washing takes place would be a mite difficult. And again, our trains and buses have timetables, not schedules. The text is littered with such divergences in use of language. This is not a trivial criticism; the characters are supposed to be British (though one has a US language implant) and it is their viewpoints we experience. Even more egregiously, in a chapter heading about not evacuating the princesses to Canada the relevant quote is attributed to their grandmother Queen Mary rather than their mother Queen Elizabeth.

As is usual in Willis’s Oxford Time Travel stories we start in the Oxford of 2060 where historians are “prepping” to make use of the time travel apparatus to experience their periods of study themselves. Between our time and then there has been some sort of disruption (the Pandemic – and a terrorist with a pinpoint bomb has blown up St Paul’s) but the feel of this future is curiously old-fashioned. Desk top telephones for urgent communication?

The plot depends on things going wrong with the mechanism of time travel, preventing the historians’ return to the future. Slippage of location and time of each “drop” are not unexpected – there are apparently inviolable rules for when and where a historian can be dropped and when the drop may reopen plus divergence points to which there is no access. It is not surprising to the reader, though, that not all goes smoothly: disorganised is too mild a word to describe the 2060s lab. This renders all the anguishing of the characters as to why their drops won’t open, that it’s their fault, tiresome.

Blackout is the usual Willis read, though, despite her famous technique, in her presentation of awards speeches, of digression to build up tension being grossly overused. In a novel it only delays getting to the point and is an almighty irritant but I suppose it helps to increase the word count.

I’m at a loss to understand why the Blackout, All Clear combination won the Hugo Award last year. The only other novel on that year’s list I have read, Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House, far outshone this.

If you travel down (or up) the B824 between the roundabout at the northern end of the M9 (where it turns into the A9 for further travel north) and the small town of Doune in Stirlingshire you can see off the road the statue of a lone figure. The signpost names it as the David Stirling Memorial.

Who was David Stirling?

Well, he was the man who started up the Special Air Services Regiment, otherwise known as the SAS.

This is the statue:-

One of the plaques on the statue’s base names Stirling, the other is a memorial to those SAS men who died on active service.

Two more photos of this statue are on my flickr site.

It’s in a lovely location on a rural hillside with views of rolling hills. And a wind farm. (I don’t think wind farms are eyesores, by the way. People who moan about them probably wax lyrical about windmills to which they are the modern equivalent.)

Why site the statue in such an out of the way spot?

Well; Stirling was a local. The Parish of Lecropt, where he was born, lies between Bridge of Allan (over the M9 near the town – now city – of Stirling) and Doune. There is a Carse of Lecropt and a Lecropt Kirk signposted as you leave Bridge of Allan heading towards the M9.

David Stirling’s Wikipedia entry shows a family connection with the Lord Lovat who led a brigade on to Sword Beach during the D-Day landings. Lovat famously ordered his personal bagpiper to pipe the commandos ashore. The defending Germans reputedly didn’t shoot him (the piper) because they thought he was mad.

That last bit about the Germans may be an urban myth but makes a great story.