Oh, I'm SO excited to see this post, because I have MANY thoughts on this and nobody else I know has read multiple of the Oxford Time Travel series.
I am, however, going to be rather more critical than the other people here, which I hope doesn't come across as trying to spoil anyone's fun. I do count myself as a fan of Connie Willis; it's very possible that To Say Nothing of the Dog is the book I've read more times than any other as an adult, and I read Doomsday Book for the first time in high school and loved it (and read it again during early lockdown and was gobsmacked by how prescient it was).
But Willis is probably the one writer, by a wide margin, whom I have the MOST mixed feelings about. The good parts of her work are incredibly good, but she also has a great number of very frustrating weaknesses, and these weaknesses become much more noticeable in Blackout/All Clear than they were in the previous two books because it's so long (and, to be honest, a bit repetitive). I'd like to quickly give a disclaimer that it's been... almost seven years? since I last read Blackout/All Clear (the other two I've reread more recently), so my recollection of the details may be patchy, and if anyone notices that something I said was wrong, feel free to correct me.
Good things first, one of the best parts of Willis' writing is the historical settings that she does an immense amount of research to make as accurate as possible. This really struck me the first time I read Doomsday Book; when Kivrin goes back to the Middle Ages, you feel like you're there. She includes so much fine detail, particularly sensory detail, that it's totally immersive AND you feel like you're learning about the past. This is especially true of Blackout/All Clear, for which she actually went to England and interviewed people who had been shop girls, ambulance drivers, etc. during the Blitz in London.
My other favorite thing about WIllis' work is the time travel system she set up, and in particular the concept of slippage and the timeline protecting itself. To Say Nothing of the Dog literally changed the way I think about history; I was so fascinated by her explanations of how massive events can turn on tiny, easily-overlooked details. Loads of writers have done the "step on a butterfly, Germany wins WWII" plot, but Willis actually provided a plausible chain of events for how a cat going missing in the Victorian era could actually endanger the outcome of the war.
The time travel system is developed more in B/AC, though to be honest, I found some of the directions she went with it in this book a bit... I guess I'll say "dubious" (more on this later). To be fair, I recently reread To Say Nothing of the Dog, and that made me realize that I'd been somewhat unfair to B/AC for a while. Without spoilers, I thought that they had basically learned the same lesson about time travel at the end of B/AC that they did at the end of TSNotD, but I've now realized that the lesson is similar but different enough to actually constitute a new piece of the Understanding Time Travel puzzle.
Now the negatives; these are things that tend to be present in all of Willis' books, but again, are more noticeable here because of the length. Some of these are just mildly annoying, but others can actually be something of a problem for the storytelling. My original plan was to make a bulleted list in rough ascending order of how much they bother me personally, but then some of the bullets got long enough that they needed full paragraphs, so I'm doing it this way. I'll try for no spoilers, but if there's anything I think could count as a spoiler I'll put it in rot13.
In my opinion, characterization as a general category is Willis's biggest weakness as a writer. Within this category, my biggest issue is that her protagonists are not really characters, they're vehicles for the plot. This is something she could largely get away with in the previous two books because the plot was so much the main focus. In TSNotD, your attention is captured by the zany madcap shenanigans and interlocking mysteries, and in Doomsday Book, you're so caught up in the tension of what'll happen to the medieval village and whether they'll be able to get Kivrin out that I legitimately didn't notice until WELL after I'd finished it that I don't know a single thing about who Kivrin is as a person.
I'll keep using Kivrin as an example because the nature of Doomsday Book makes her really illustrative of this. I mean, we can gather that she has a few broad personality traits; we can assume she's tenacious and intelligent because she had to convince her department to let her go to the medieval period when no one else had done that before, and she grows to care a lot about the medieval villagers, so we could say she's compassionate. But she doesn't really have any interiority or distinctive quirks that bring her to life. Does she have any interests other than medieval history? Does she have hobbies or friends? She literally believes that she's going to be trapped in the Middle Ages for the rest of her life, and not ONCE does she think about any friends or family members back home she's scared she'll never see again.
Now, again, in a book like Doomsday Book, this isn't the worst thing. The book is really about the two epidemics and the medieval society, not Kivrin, and having her be such a blank slate might make it easier for readers to project themselves onto her, which could make that sense of Really Being There even stronger. But in B/AC it becomes a real problem, because not only are there three main characters (two women and one man), it also has a somewhat non-linear plot structure, and two of the three leads have multiple secret identities with different names. So not only did it take me ages to consistently remember which female protagonist was which, because the only discernible difference between them is that one is more experienced with time travel than the other, sometimes it would randomly cut to a different character in a different year with a different name. Who I would presume was one of the already-named characters, but it was really hard to tell, because none of them had any strong personality traits or a distinctive thing they would do that would clue me in that "oh, it's you!! I know you, of course!!"
Credit where credit is due, Willis, has created some good secondary characters in her work - Father Roche in Doomsday Book and TJ in TSNotD are good examples - but she often runs into problems here as well. My first bullet point was originally going to be "Running jokes that continue to be beaten to death long after they stop being funny, and a specific subcategory of this: one-dimensional joke characters who have one or two character traits and exist solely to be annoying," so I'll just put that here (not to be parasocial, but every time I read a Connie Willis book, I have to wonder if perhaps she has a mother-in-law she hates, because there's always at least one older woman character whose entire personality is "shrill and unreasonably demanding." And often there's more than one). And then some secondary characters, e.g. Mr. Dunworthy, just have the same issue as the protagonists of being more or less blank slates, or they're just archetypes of a certain concept of a person Willis wants to represent, like the everyday heroes of the Blitz.
I wasn't really sure what to name this section, and it'll probably be where I tie in a bunch of miscellaneous points that didn't fit anywhere else, but the political perspective in Willis' books fascinates and compels me, in a mildly frustrating sort of way. I'll probably put some subheadings in here too.
I don't know anything about Willis' personal political beliefs, and those matter less than what's actually in the text anyway, but one thing we DO know about her is that she's a Christian, and when you read her work, you can tell. I'm not just referring to stuff like the vicar's wife in TSNotD sniffily sniffing about the decreasing importance of religion in everyday life, though that too, I mean the fact that you could replace "the timeline" with "God" at the end of TSNotD and it would read almost exactly the same. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with being a Christian, and a Christian perspective isn't automatically a conservative one, but in the case of Willis' work... I feel like it kind of is? Conservative-leaning, at the very least. "Let's not change society it's fine the way it is."
The next subheading is more minor, but I'm putting it first because it'll lead into the one that follows:
This definitely falls more into the "minor annoyance" category and I'm being very petty in bringing it up, but oh my GOD, once you notice it you will never stop noticing it (I'm sorry if you hadn't already noticed it before now).
Listen, I have no problem with straight characters in my media. I am not among those who think heterosexuality is automatically boring; straight characters and relationships can be written in a way that's interesting to me. But Connie Willis shoves heterosexuality down her readers' throats the way homophobes think gay media shoves gayness down their throats, to a degree I've never seen before, and it's at its very Most in B/AC. And it is SO fucking boring.
It seems like every single time a female protagonist meets a male contemp or a male protagonist meets a female contemp, the contemp either has to show a romantic interest in the protagonist (which the protagonist will have to find a way to tactfully reject on account of being a time traveler) or assume that the protagonist has a romantic interest in them and tell them that they're not available (and the protagonist will have to pretend to be disappointed to spare their ego). It feels like men and women are never allowed to just interact with each other, they ALWAYS have to romantically size each other up first. And everyone has to be paired up with their opposite-sex soulmate at the end regardless of things like "relationship-building" or "chemistry" (this is also more or less why I didn't really care for the Pbyva cybg I'm sorry) or at the very least be heterosexually in love with someone.
The existence of any orientation other than straight is also almost entirely absent from these books; one could almost think it doesn't exist. There are exactly two mentions of a gay person in B/AC: one is a man in a musical theater troupe who has exactly one line and then disappears from the book forever. The other is Alan Turing, and this is where the heterosexuality thing is no longer a petty complaint and actually becomes a genuine problem for me.
If you've read TSNotD, I don't think it'll be a spoiler to say that Alan Turing is a somewhat important plot point in B/AC; you already know how fascinated Willis is with Ultra and how important it was to the course of WWII that the Germans never found out about it. Naturally, in the WWII book, that element is even more front-and-center. One of the protagonists at some point goes to Bletchley Park to do something or other, I forget what, and Alan Turing almost runs them over on his bicycle. This is the one (1) time Turing actually appears, and to my recollection, he doesn't even say a single line. Characters talk about him and how important it is that nothing interferes with his work, but Turing as a person doesn't actually matter, and the book never mentions his sexual orientation OR what the British government did to him after he helped them win the war.
To be honest, I do find that pretty offensive. This book is So. Freaking. Long. And Willis takes so much pride in her research and attention to accuracy. She could have spared ONE sentence to be less glowingly positive about British society as a whole and consider the possibility that Britain might have done a bad thing at least once in its existence. Which brings me to my next point:
This one is weird because Connie Willis isn't even British, she's American. And as far as I can tell she's never lived in Britain and her husband isn't British, so. Huh. But, weird American anglophiles do exist.
B/AC is about the everyday heroes of WWII in Britain: the ordinary people who got up every day and kept society running even while bombs fell, or who risked their lives to save others by doing things like driving ambulances. This is a good premise for a book! It's pretty uncommon for WWII stories to not focus primarily on just the most important players, or on the soldiers on the battlefront. The everyday citizens WERE incredibly important for the war effort, and portraying the mundane, everyday lives of historical people is Willis' bread and butter and something she does incredibly well, so this book was a natural fit for her.
The flat portrayal of British society as an unmitigated force for good and overall "Rah Rah Go Britain, Rule Britannia, God Save The King" feel of it all leaves kind of a weird taste in my mouth, though. To hear Willis tell it, the Good, Upstanding citizens of Britain bravely rose up as one to hold their upper lips stiff and Keep Calm and Carry On no matter what, and it was heroic and inspiring and they won the war, The End. Nobody opposed Britain's involvement, nobody took advantage of the chaos and desperation to line their own pockets, nobody was a far-right nationalist or antisemite whose only problem with Nazi Germany was that it posed a threat to Britain. At worst, maybe some individuals were unpleasant or annoying to deal with on an interpersonal level. It's very feel-good BBC documentary in a way that verges on feeling like I'm being propagandized to.
Again, in a book that's so long, you'd think there'd be room for a little complexity! But unless I'm forgetting something, Willis doesn't have anything to say about Britain that isn't uncomplicated praise. And by Britain I mean England, here, not the rest of the empire, as far as I remember the book doesn't even mention the imperial fronts (a quick text search tells me that the word "empire" is never used), just the Great and Heroic Home Front.
This is part of a pattern for Willis, where she just... doesn't seem like a person who's interested at all in critiquing existing power structures or hegemonic narratives. Take the end of TSNotD, for example. After the historians find out that they can rescue things from the past that were destroyed in their own time, Mr. Dunworthy lists some examples of things he wants to go back and save. After the obvious "library of Alexandria" and other lost books, these are the other things he names: St. Paul's cathedral, the painting of The Light of the World, Nelson’s tomb, and the statue of John Donne. All either important religious sites/artifacts or monuments to venerated British national heroes.
This is fascinating to me as someone with an interest in how people engage with and reinforce historical narratives, but I can't say it's a list of priorities I agree with. And one can't argue that these are just Mr. Dunworthy's priorities and not Connie Willis speaking through him! Mr. Dunworthy is not a character with thoughts or interiority! As already discussed!
Last point, I think. And it'll be a short one to avoid spoilers. I said that this book builds on Willis' concept of time travel, and it does, and that I was wrong to say that the ending of the last book made the driving conflict of this one redundant, which I was. But also, to keep it vague, there's a Thing that they think is happening. There's some sort of problem with the time travel, which has resulted in an Emergency for our three protagonists and potentially the whole timeline, and they believe that to protect itself, the timeline is going to do a Thing. This Thing that they think is going to happen makes no damn sense if you think about it even a little bit because it would immediately make the problem SO much worse. If anybody has a Watsonian explanation that would make it make sense, or there's something I'm just not considering, I'd actually really appreciate you letting me know, because this is the sort of thing that burrows into my brain and drives me insane.
Despite all this, I DID enjoy Blackout/All Clear. I think I even rated it five stars on my long-abandoned Goodreads account, though I think that was very much influenced by the feelings of goodwill generated by Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog being so good, and thinking back on it, I definitely wouldn't give it five stars now lol. Maybe three, three and a half? If you enjoy the historical worldbuilding in Willis' work, there's lots and lots of that for you here. It really does give you a really good look into what everyday life was like for millions of ordinary UK citizens during WWII, even if it does tend to, ah, accentuate the positive. It can be somewhat repetitive and the plot could have been streamlined a bit, but I mostly don't mind the length because so much of what people call "padding" is just the worldbuilding, which is the thing I like.
It is not a nuanced portrayal of different British attitudes toward the war, there are no interesting moral ambiguities or explorations of systemic issues, and most of the characters are pretty cardboard. If that bothers you, you might not like this book so much, but honestly, these are flaws that I find fun to analyze even if they're frustrating to read in the moment, so if you're like me you might still get value out it even if you dislike parts of it. But also, maybe the things that bother me won't bother you! Everyone is different! Also, again, it's been seven years since I read this book, so it's also possible that I've built its flaws up in my mind as more prominent than they actually were.
And there you have it! I hope this helps, or is interesting, and if you want to read the book, which you seem to be leaning toward, I think that would be a worthwhile thing to do, and I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts!