Review: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

[angel_negra]

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a time travel story and I think one of my favourite things about this book was how time travel was approached. While it's certainly a big part of the plot, time travel in this book is an academic thing. There's no big bad or great hero risking it all to travel back and change some key point in history, no great lovers torn apart by time, no horrible dystopian future or present in need of fixing. There is, however, a missing cat.

Time travel in Willis' book is done by historians. They study up on the time period and language of the period, are sent back in period appropriate clothes and interact with history as a means of studying it. What's interesting is the rules for time travel; that you can't bring back anything but what you took with you, especially if it's important to history; if a time traveler does too many jumps in a row, they can suffer from time lag, which is a jumped up version of jet lag; sometimes certain areas/times aren't reachable, because the system/history is considered a crisis or fragile point in time, so travelers might be off by a few days/miles.

The story opens on a very time lagged historian, Ned Henry, who's been traveling around under the orders of a very rich woman, Lady Schrapnell, who's commandeered his department to help recreate a specific church, destroyed by a fire during the WW2 bombings in London, in memory of one of her ancestors who'd experienced a life changing moment in said church. Ned has been tasked to find out the fate of a particular artifact, named the Bishop's Bird Stump.

Ned returns to his present from another unsuccessful search and is badly time lagged enough that his doctor is trying to put him on two weeks bed rest. In an attempt to escape Lady Schrapnell, who doesn't believe in time lag, Ned winds up getting roped into returning something to the 19th century that his boss is worried might rip the fabric of time if it's not returned immediately.

Which is how Ned finds himself sent to a time period he barely knows, still hazy on the majority of his mission - between the exhaustion and possible hallucinations - and has somehow wound up riding a rented rowing boat down the Thames river with a young man determined to meet up with the love of his life, a very eccentric Oxford professor and a bulldog named Cyril.

This is the first book I've read by Willis and I highly enjoyed it. It makes good use of comedic moments/tone while still making the important moments sign with dramatic tension. Ned, and later his fellow time traveller, Verity, have to solve the problem of fixing the event which is changing the future, but what I liked is that while as the reader, we can guess at information the characters don't know, Willis gives us solid reasoning for why the characters haven't figured it out yet, and so it's not a case of the characters just being too stupid.

Ned's delirious and severely exhausted at the start of the story and this hampers his ability to pick up on things being explained to him. The Oxford professor is very eccentric and keeps wandering off to hunt for fish, which allows him to hamper the characters in their attempts to reach their goals, but in a way that's hilarious and feels very organic. Willis even uses the mores and rules of Victorian society to her advantage in the plot.

One thing that didn't work as well for me in the story was when different characters would go on little asides about history, which felt in character, don't get me wrong. They don't feel forced in or like Willis is just trying to show off her historical knowledge, but as someone who isn't the greatest history student, I found it very easy to get a bit lost and skim all the big names just for the context of why it's related to what the characters were talking about.

I did love the twists Willis works into the story. For every step forward the characters made towards their plot resolution, there would be a new complication or twist that I didn't see coming. Especially the twist at the end, which was so cool. And I loved how organic the twists and complications felt. It didn't feel like twists or complications just for the sake of having them, but worked well to show off the characters as complicated people or to hint at the events happening that were bigger than just Ned and Verity's mission.

All in all, this was a great book and I highly recommend it.

Comments

[ljwrites]

I recently listened to Professor Michael Drout's From Here to Infinity, an audio lecture about science fiction, and in one of the later lectures he mentioned that for whatever reason women writers are killing it in the time travel genre, as in they're dominating it with great stories. Maybe it's because a good time travel story requires the sense that you are in different time periods, and women writers (to generalize broadly) tend to be good with everyday details. I've heard the title of this book before and may end up checking it out.

[angel_negra]

Well, I've read another book that Willis has written set in the same universe and it really does feel like she knows her eras well. They have a real ring of truth to them that really grounds you in the period. I think Professor Drout's got a good point. I have another female author review pending that's also about time travel and it's also a solid book. (Plus a steampunk series that's put far, far more thought into the tech/history than the novel that kicked off the genre.)