Ian's Reviews > Doomsday Book

I finished Doomsday Book this morning and immediately moved on to the next book on my to-read list, which happens to be Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Doomsday Book left me a little messed up in the head and I wanted to replace the imagery and train of thought with something new. I figured I'd have to let Doomsday Book mull around in my head for a while before I could write an effective review. I figured the same about Iain Banks' Transition, another book I recently finished. So my plan was to read Hyperion then come back and write thoughtful reviews of all three.

But I can't stop thinking about Doomsday Book. I can't get the images out of my head. I can't get the train of thought out of my head. I can't stop my throat from tightening or my jaw from clenching. In other words, "a little messed up" hardly describes how Connie Willis has left me. A better description would be "pretty fucked up."

I don't know what Doomsday Book was about to all of you. I can see how different people would take different lessons, themes, or morals from this book. I just know what it was about for me: a crisis of faith. Some authors have an uncanny ability to meet us where we're at--to take longstanding human themes and make them once again relevant to what the reader is going through in his or her life. Connie Willis certainly did so for me.

I have been going through my own crisis of faith over the last year or so. I have been a believer in, and follower of, Jesus Christ for as long as I can remember, and although my faith has been challenged and wavered at various points in my life, I have been spiritually pretty steady. But never have I experienced so much doubt as I have over the last year.

2009 began with such hope in my life ... I seemed on the road to recovering from a chronic nervous system disorder that causes constant pain; my wife and I seemed poised to renew and repair our relationship and get back to a loving marriage; and we seemed finally to be obtaining long-worked-for financial stability. But I now look back on 2009 as the most difficult year I have endured. My physical condition deteriorated substantially (I've written some of my frustration on this subject in another review); my marriage hit rock bottom (fortunately we are getting back on track following a new year's resolution to forgive one another for the past and start loving one another for the future); my wife got laid off and I took a 15% pay cut (there is still no light at the end of that tunnel). But that was nothing ...

... and here's the most obvious parallel to Doomsday Book ... my family witnessed death and suffering seemingly everywhere we looked. People we care about, God-fearing people, genuine Good People ... are going through some really Bad Shit. It began with my wife's close friend dying in childbirth. Kelly was 28 years old, healthy, happily married, and full of joy to be pregnant with her first child. Her doctor fucked up, and mother and child died. Then came 10-year-old Destiny, a student in my wife's 5th grade classroom. She was a delightful and intelligent girl. Conscientious, caring, hard-working, and kind to everyone she knew. Destiny was kind and helpful to my kids. She was smart and ambitious and had a wonderful life ahead of her. She was one of the kids that made all the crap worth it for my wife. Then Destiny got in a car driven by her mother's drunk boyfriend. Destiny had been talking about how the next week she was going to demand that she be allowed to live with her father so she could get away from the jackass who beat her mother. If only she had gotten out a week sooner. The drunk woman-beating piece of shit was driving twice the speed limit on a country road near our house, slammed into a ditch and flipped the car several times. Destiny died at the scene. Next it was my co-worker, Diane, who sits a few offices down the hall from me. The air was thick with her palpable desperation and grief when she got the phone call no parent should ever have to take ... her son had committed suicide. As if that weren't enough, another student died from cancer ... but that seemed somehow like just a cruel afterthought, since he had been sick for months and nobody expected him to survive.

Where was God in my life last year? Where was God when I prayed for physical and relational healing? Where was God when Kelly was about to give birth to a beautiful baby girl? Where was God when Destiny needed deliverance from an abusive household? Where was God when Diane's son needed His love and comfort?

It will be several years before I fully recover from the pain, both experienced and witnessed, that cut a swath through my life in 2009. Spiritually, I don't know that I will ... or can. My cries for help went unheeded and my prayers for healing unanswered. God abandoned Good People who needed Him. He stood by and watched.

And it hit home for the first time in my life that what I experienced and witnessed in 2009 was nothing unique, or even rare. I was forced to confront the reality that I had lived a cushy life while people suffered and grieved all around me, even right here in the good 'ol U S of A, and that 2009 was simply my turn at the table. So I started to question, where was God during all the years when I was living easy while Good People experienced Bad Shit down the street and in the next town and across the border? How could I have sat and so smugly thanked God for the blessings in my life without at least wondering why God was allowing such suffering in other peoples lives?

Doomsday Book made the Black Plague real for me. Willis took me there and made me love the people of that little village in Oxfordshire. Then she made me watch them die, one by one, in the most horrifying way possible. She made that shit real. And the thing is, it was real! The village and characters in Doomsday Book might have been fictional, but there were thousands of real villages, and millions of real people, who weren't all that different and who died those deaths for real seven hundred years ago. Of course they wondered where God was. Of course they thought God had abandoned them. I am having a crisis of faith because of 2009 ... I can't imagine the crisis of faith people must have felt in 1349.

And, now that I think about it, shouldn't the reality of 1349 cause a crisis of faith in all of us? We weren't there, but real people were. It's pure, blind, dumb luck that you and I were born in the 20th century instead of the 14th century. Those people were just as "frightened and brave and irreplaceable" (in Kivrin's words) as we are. And many of the people in 1349 had a faith that those of us in 21st century America can't shake a stick at! Those people believed the spiritual world was real and tangible and affected their daily lives. They had no doubt that God was real and that He intervened in the physical world. Yet God abandoned them. God set a new mark for ditching the Faithful in time of greatest need.

If God couldn't be bothered to spare good, faithful people from the Black Death, how can he be bothered to intervene in our cushy little insignificant lives?

And so my crisis of faith is quickly becoming a Crisis of Faith. In case you're wondering, no, I don't blame Connie Willis. Doomsday Book simply catalyzed my thought processes along their already natural progressions. If anything I'm glad I read Doomsday Book when I did, because I think I got the most that I can get out of it. But I am left wondering where I go from here. I think I just need time. Time for things to sink in. Time to put 2009 in context and perspective. Time to do therapeutic things like writing this review.

I don't know where I'll end up, but I know I must walk down this path. Will Mr. Dunworthy be waiting at the drop? Will Badri be well enough to open the net? Will Colin have any energy left to make it all happen? We'll see.