Honeyed Words: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis · 21 May 2007

To Say Nothing of the Dog pays homage to the classic Victorian comic work Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog

It copies the style of the original work, even including rambling chapter titles that serve as both a forward and short summary of the coming pages; however, unlike my perusal of Three Men in a Boat (which after 80 pages seemed nothing more than a series of comic events during a boating trip), To Say Nothing of the Dog has an engaging and forward moving plot.

Ned Henry is a British historian from 2057 who has been hijacked by one of the local gentry, Lady Schrapnell, to reconstruct Coventry cathedral. In Lady Schrapnell’s relentless pursuit of authenticity, she has the entire professional time-traveling community working around the clock and making voyages to the past to ensure she’s got every detail picture perfect for the christening of the cathedral in fourteen days.

Ned has been assigned to find out what happened to the bishop’s bird stump, a truly hideous object that disappeared at the time the original cathedral was destroyed in World War II. When we first meet him, Ned is suffering from severe time-lag, a condition akin to jet-lag on steroids. At Lady Schrapnell’s insistence, he’s made 12 drops in the past week, well over the recommended number, attending jumble sales and talking to former bishops’ wives in pursuit of the bishop’s bird stump. Now, as he searches through the ruins of the cathedral the day after it burned down he’s got Trouble Distinguishing Sounds and a Tendency to Wax Poetically.

“You’d help if you could, wouldn’t you boy?” I said. “It’s no wonder they call you man’s best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we have ever known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by-”

Just as Ned bends to pat the dog during a well-deserved sit down, he finds himself yanked back to the present and wakes up in the Infirmary, where he is prescribed fourteen days of rest and relaxation, with absolutely no time travel. The problem, of course, is that the intractable Lady Schrapnell won’t let any of the historians take a moment’s liberty until the cathedral project is complete. Already, Ned’s superiors have sent Lady Schrapnell on a wild goose chase to various hospitals and they’re running out of time to hide Ned before he’s discovered.

Escape presents itself in the way of a crises, as we find out that Verity Kindle, another historian, has caused an incongruity in the time travel system by . . . doing something, Ned isn’t quite sure what due to his Trouble Distinguishing Sounds. Ned’s being sent back to the Victorian era, to patch up the mess, and then spend two weeks convalescing. He’s quickly briefed and then quite literally dives through the time-travel net as Lady Schrapnell, having exhausted her wild goose chase, storms into the laboratory raving after him.

Having narrowly escaped Lady Schrapnell, Ned’s only problem is that he doesn’t know his mission, his destination, or where he’s ended up.

In rollicking good fashion, Ned meets up with Terrance St. Trewes and they set off on a grand adventure in which Ned eventually discovers his mission, comes face to face with an extinct species, meets an authentic batty professor, and even spots Jerome K. Jerome on his famous tour down the river.

Along the way, Willis intertwines the Victorian story with that of the book’s present, keeping Ned appraised of the incongruency in the time-travel net. As Ned works to complete his assigned mission, he commingles with other historians who are working on a larger mission to save the version of the future that Ned came from. Amidst many complications, Ned is caught up in the quest, which oftentimes fortuitously ties into his search for the bishop’s bird stump.

Willis uses a device throughout the book that’s heavily employed in the first few chapters, that of having the reader recognize what’s really going on via the bumbling observations of Ned. We recognize Ned’s time-lagged condition by his rambling concern for his fellow drop mate, Carruthers.

I frowned, trying to remember the checklist of time-lag symptoms. Maudlin sentimentality, difficulty in distinguishing sounds, fatigue - . . . What were the other symptoms? Tendency to become distracted by irrelevancies. Slowness in answering. Blurred vision. . . Irritability was a definite symptom. No, so long as Carruthers wasn’t completely incoherent, it was better to stay here . . .

Carruthers came over, looking neither fatigued nor distracted. Good.

“Ned!” he said. “Didn’t you hear me calling?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about something.”

“You must have been. I’ve been calling for five minutes,” he said. “Did she have Dookie with her?”

I must have mishead that, too, or else Carruthers was more time-lagged than I thought. “Dookie?” I said cautiously.

“Ned, can’t you hear me?” Carruthers was saying worriedly. “I said ‘Did she have Dookie with her?’”

“With whom?” I said, wondering how I was going to convince him he needed to be taken out. Time-lag victims never think they’re time-lagged.”

Willis pokes subtle fun of a time-traveling technician and the changes in the modern definition of femininity by having her rant in non-traditional feminine fashion, drowning out Ned’s subliminal tapes describing proper Victorian decorum for ladies. I thought this was an appropriate method of humor for a book inspired by the Victorian era, where writers made their name by their subtle wit.

It seems, in her attempt to parody the work of Jerome K. Jerome and his contemporaries (such as P.G. Woodhouse) that Willis has intentionally decided to cast her modern characters in the image of the Victorian era. Ned and Verity behave similarly whether “in character” as Victorians or not. Though Ned is not an expert in the Victorian era, he seems rather familiar with it, probably as a means to allow him to wax prosaically and insert period speech.

I didn’t think that the device detracted from the text, but at times I do feel Willis was playing with a contrived notion. While perfectly reasonable that Ned would have drawn comparisons to Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat while actually on the river with two other men (to say nothing of the dog), I find it hard to believe that as he and Verity were fighting to save the future of the world that he’d be so wrapped up in coming up with the perfect quote. But then, Victorian gentlemen were men of leisure, and Ned adapts surprisingly well to this convention.

By the end of the book, I had trouble seeing Ned as a future-modern man and believed he’d be better suited to the Victorian era, trouble with dinner forks and all. This could be because when Ned and Verity return to 2057, it’s hard to distinguish the time and place by the manners of the people. I think this is due to the light-handed way in which Willis portrays Victorian England and the lack of significant cultural change in the future she’s set up. There’s very little outward difference in the manners of the future Brits and those she’s invented from Victorian times, aside from their tendency to worry more that the cathedral’s altar cloths are authentic than about whether their clothes are appropriate to their activity.

As a comedy and a parody, this book succeeds. As historical fiction, it presents the mood of another time, whether it’s an accurate mood, I’ll leave to the historians to say ;). As science-fiction, it presents a light introduction to the idea of time travel, its theoretical laws, and how they can go awry. In all, I enjoyed reading the book and recommend it as good escapism.

After reading a bit by fans of Willis, I’ve heard that this is not her best work, so I’ll be sure to check out more by her in the future.

Connie Willis, Coventry Cathedral, Humor, Hugo Award Winner, Jerome K. Jerome, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Time Travel, Victorian England