To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Some books feel absolutely made for the moment when you first found them. When I picked up Christopher Fowler’s Full House Dark I was looking for some sort of interesting, folklore or myth based mystery story. As it turned out, not only did I find that, but I found myself reading an entire series featuring his fantastic characters Bryant and May as they were released over the following years. Or there was the day I stumbled across my first Stephen King book, It. I was looking for something engrossing, something with a strong backbone and a narrative that kept you reading into the next chapter and the next. That book opened the door to a lot of other books, as you can imagine. Elmore Leonard is currently doing the same for me, whenever I fancy a dip into smooth prose, electric dialogue, and riotous, quick footed storytelling.
Recently, as I’ve probably mentioned on here before, I have been struggling a bit with some genre novels. The purer science fiction I’ve been reading has left my toes curling. Whilst some of the comedy novels I’ve been reading, as great as they are, have felt so removed from my day to day reality thanks to being set back in the 1930s that, if anything, they’re probably serving as a stronger escapism than the sci fi. Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog, however, turned out to be a perfect weaving of those two styles of story to create something I didn’t entirely know I was looking for.
Now it's hard to describe the plot of a time travel story without tripping over spoilers, so I’ll keep this brief. Maybe one of the best ways I can sum up this book is try and imagine what would happen if P.G. Wodehouse had been commissioned to write Twelve Monkeys. You’d need to swap out a couple of things, though. That sense of doom isn’t quite there. This is a book focused on making you laugh more than questioning your own sense of fate and mortality. There’s also no virus, although a pandemic is mentioned. Instead, our time travelling historians here are being sent back in time to try and track down artefacts in order to rebuild the old, bombed out Coventry cathedral. There’s also less of that intricate Gilliam clutter. Willis’ time travellers are, like I said, historians. They’re working out of universities, selling their services to keep themselves funded, causing them to be hounded by persistent benefactors such as the dreaded Mrs Schrapnell as they cope with a constant lack of capable staff.
Our main character, Ned Henry, is a man on this mission. We first meet him in the cathedral, just after the bombing raid, posing as a local, or a contemp as Willis calls them. He’s trying to find one rather hideous artefact in particular for the aforementioned Mrs Schrapnell, who’s draining all of the departments resources for her mission to rebuild Coventry cathedral.
When Ned’s returned to his own time, it’s clear to his superiors that he’s struggling with time lag, unable to focus on words or sounds or locations thanks to the number of drops he’s been sent on. Some of which are to look over old jumble sales to try and ascertain where certain relics have ended up, which might be one of the greatest examples of English time travel I’ve ever come across in a story.
In order to help him relax and escape the pressures of the cathedral rebuild, he’s sent back to Victorian England. Only his trip becomes anything but relaxing. He ends up entangled in a whole string of problems surrounding a country house, prized fish, doomed cats, young love, poetry, absentminded professors, stolen butlers, fake seances and, naturally, the fate of all mankind.
Granted, the book is a tad long. The copy I read rolled in at just over five hundred pages. That said, Willis’ style and plot rarely left me looking past the page for something else to read or feeling that I was working my way through a lot of filler. There is simply a lot to go through, particularly as she sets up the many players both in Ned’s present (our future) and the Victorian past (very much the past – a past Ned first has to learn about through some rushed preparation which leads to all manner of problems when it comes to dinner forks and polite conversation). She also gives Ned a preoccupation with slim chances that have changed history seemingly on the toss of a coin. So, you do get a number of those as examples as what might possibly go wrong if he fails.
Once you get into the meat of the story, however, it is a time travel story quite unlike any other. After all, how many other time travellers (police box riding time lords included) have involved battling fake seances or accidentally running into the characters of a famous book whilst out on a boat. She also gives Ned a lovely relationship with two animals who he keeps having to share a bed with, meaning he never quite gets the rest he needs. There’s the happy, drooling and occasionally lazy dog Cyril, and the cat, Princess Arjumand, who appears to be doomed to drown, if she’s not smothered to death by her over attentive owner first.
The blurb for this book made it sound as if the real driving point of this story was Ned losing track of which present he actually belongs in due to his time lag, and the opening of the novel certainly suggests that’s where you’re heading. I don’t think it’s a spoiler, though, to say that’s not really where this book will lead you. Instead, you’re taking a trip through a Victorian comedy of manners with a time traveller who’s trying to repair the changes to history that he keeps making by accident, after realising that all of history is hanging in the balance thanks to his earlier actions. The dialogue is fantastically written, with characters talking over each other or at crossed purposes as the many different thread of the book keep getting knotted together. So, really, I guess try to think of this as P.G. Wodehouse’s Twelve Monkeys, directed by Robert Altman.
In fact, once the story begins to focus on the bigger picture in the final act, beyond that one summer at Muchings End, you do find yourself almost missing the humour those characters brought to Ned’s life. Although it’s not long before Willis begins to relish the detective story aspect that she’s been seeding around Ned since he first travelled back to the Victorian era and found himself lying across a train track, with his luggage scattered around him.
She does a phenomenal job to not just give you more than one satisfying ending, and to keep all of the plates spinning through the changes in tone that you find warping around Ned’s confusing life, but to also keep those endings within the context of the characters she’s set up within them. It is a brilliant sleight of hand trick that allows her to offer answers to some of the book’s biggest questions, and tackling a really interesting theory when it comes to the nature of time travel. You’ll just happen to find yourself hunting for cats by midnight river banks, trying to stop old con artist mystics from cracking their toes before you can wrap messages you’re supposedly receiving from beyond the grave, or darting back to the earliest days of the building of an ancient cathedral along the way.
Maybe the best way to sum up the time I’ve spent with this book is to say I’ve recently learnt that Willis wrote two more books around her time travelling Oxford historians. From what I can make out, they’re not exactly the same as To Say Nothing of the Dog, but I didn’t want to learn to much about them beyond that. No, I’d rather wait and be surprised by where Connie Willis is going to take me next time. I’m sure it will be one hell of a trip, wherever we’re going.