Book Review: To Say Nothing of the Dog

Connie Willis 
1997
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –   


To Say Nothing of the Dog is another fine, fine piece of work by Connie Willis. 

As in her novels Blackout/All Clear and Doomsday Book, the story revolves around the history department at Oxford University in the late twenty-first century. By that time, time travel has been invented and historians use it to research the past up close. The time-travel device they use, which they call the “net,” has safeguards built into it to prevent anyone from traveling back to a place or time when they’d be able to cause a significant incongruity in the historical continuum. For example, if someone tries to go back to murder Lord Wellington so Napoleon would win the battle of Waterloo, the net may not open to let them through. Or, if it does open, there will be temporal or locational “slippage” and they will be dropped several days too late or in the middle of a field hundreds of miles away from the battle.

Theoretically, at least. The safeguards have never actually been conclusively proven to prevent incongruities. So there is always the chance of slipping up…

In To Say Nothing of the Dog, a bossy and opinionated force of nature (and wealthy donor to the university) named Lady Schrapnell has decided to rebuild the Coventry cathedral, which was destroyed in World War II. She insists on commandeering all of Oxford’s historians to help her get the details right for the grand opening, sending them back in time to check facts or to bring back more accurate descriptions of the décor. It means everyone is completely preoccupied with her project and has no time for their own regular research.

One of these historians, Ned Henry, is suffering a serious case of exhaustion caused by too many time-travel drops. His adviser, Mr. Dunworthy, prescribes a couple days of rest in the English countryside in the Victorian Era where Lady Schrapnell won’t be able to find him.

Dunworthy chooses the year 1888 for Ned’s vacation because Verity Kindle, another historian, has just returned from a research assignment in that year, rashly bringing back a cat which she rescued after a butler had thrown it into the river. Dunworthy is furious at Verity because bringing something back from the past is likely to cause an incongruity. So he gives the cat to Ned to bring back to its Victorian-era owners (or meet its Victorian-era fate) and sends Verity back separately to complete her assignment.

But, unfortunately, Ned, addle-brained from time lag, doesn’t hear the instructions about the cat that Dunworthy yells to him as the net is closing.

Ned then drops into the summer of 1888, and the story that follows is a fast-paced romp through continuously barely-controlled chaos as Ned and Verity try to return the cat and end up causing all kinds of other historical incongruities which they then have to try to fix. (Among the worst, potentially, is that they accidentally prevent a young man and woman from meeting each other whose son is supposed to have become an RAF pilot flying key sorties over Germany in World War II.)

Along the way they have to navigate the tricky waters of Victorian propriety, church jumble sales, and country estate living. They run into great characters: a crusty colonel, an eccentric Oxford don, a simpering, be-ruffled prima donna, a séance-holding medium. Ned and Verity have nothing but the best intentions but are always just barely this side of destroying their contemporary world as they know it.

There are also some really nice moments when Ned is able to pause amidst all the chaos and appreciate scenes that he’ll never be able to see again—like the peaceful streets of Coventry as they were in 1888 before they were destroyed by German bombs, and the banks of the Thames before they were covered with highways and factories.

As with every Connie Willis book, this one is packed with colorful, but not ostentatious, historical and literary details. It is also extraordinarily well put together—an amazing feat considering how many complex, intertwining sub-plots and mysteries she is juggling simultaneously, across several eras in the same temporal location. And Willis is, as always, equally good at giving us moments that are truly hilarious, and moments that are poignant and moving.