Book Review: To Say Nothing of the Dog

I don't think I've ever read another book quite like To Say Nothing of the Dog. What Connie Willis has written in this award-winning fantasy novel is an adroit mix of history, science fiction, and comedy of manners. A misstep in any one of those areas would have hurt the book, but Willis retains her footing throughout, and I was amused by her first-person narrative of a time-traveling historian's search for a "bishop's bird stump" in and around Coventry Cathedral, made urgent by the necessity of recovering said object in time for the consecration of a meticulously rebuilt replica cathedral (Come 2056, Willis implies that the restoration committee wants a medieval look, not the cathedral as it had first been rebuilt between 1956 and 1962). In the course of the story we also discover, as the historian does, what jumble sales and penwipers are (or, more properly, were).

Wry humor and the author's knowing fondness for Victorian society keep Ned the narrator from turning into the fop he threatens at first to become, and if you didn't know that Willis makes her home in Greeley, Colorado, you'd swear she was an heir to the literary traditions of Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, and Lewis Carroll. The novel even has shades of Oscar Wilde, and, of course, a tip of the straw boater for Jerome K. Jerome.

Cyril the ugly but amiable bulldog is a fine supporting character, the kind of canine even Dean Koontz would be hard-pressed to improve upon. The dog even has his own foil, one "Princess Arjumand," a spoiled cat who may or may not have triggered a self-correcting disruption in the space-time continuum.

The story also gives a butler named Blaine a well-deserved star turn, and keeps Ned motivated even through confusion by his growing affection for a time-traveling colleague named Verity Kindle, whom Willis describes as the sort of effortlessly beautiful woman that any male time traveler would be happy to kiss for 169 years, assuming time-travel drop schedules between England past and England future allow for that sort of thing, as they do in this lighthearted romp through big questions.

Willis drops the ball on only two occasions I can see, by failing to fill in the blanks on one major character and one minor one. The major character, Lady Schrapnell, is an exceedingly forceful person whom readers meet only by reputation, when other characters are trying to avoid her. The minor character is a novice historian new also to time travel. He shows up for comic relief as "the recruit," but does not otherwise pull his own weight in the plot.

I alluded earlier to big questions. However lighthearted and sunny her technique, Willis uses this novel to explore themes of causality, often by using theories allegedly held by rival professors to muse about whether impersonal forces or headstrong characters have more effect on history. The story is peppered with well-researched anecdotes about things like the Allied effort to keep code-breaking success a secret from the Nazis in World War Two.

Looking for an antique "bird stump" in the company of several colorful "contemps" gives time-traveling Ned and Verity a chance to ponder how much even seemingly trivial events can affect the course of history.

As one of the professor characters observes, Abraham Lincoln might not have become a lawyer and then a politician but for the fact that he found a complete collection of Black's Commentary on Law in a barrel he bought cheaply at a "jumble sale." The multi-volume commentary would have been out of his price range otherwise. Obtained secondhand and quite by accident, it became a springboard for the rest of Lincoln's career. Choices made at and before the battle of Waterloo also provoke these characters to thought. Unlike some of the snooze-inducing arguments over time travel "slippage," those anecdotes never drag.

Whether "To Say Nothing of the Dog" represents or departs from Willis's usual style, I don't know enough to say. But this was a fun book, and I intend to read her other work as well.