Book Review: Lincoln's Dreams

Connie Willis
1987
Awards: Campbell
Nominations: Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Connie Willis is up to somewhat other than her usual time-travel tricks with this little novel. Or, rather, it is still sort of a time-travel story like many of her best, in that the past impinges on the present and perhaps vice versa, but this one doesn’t use actual time-travel machinery.

As in much of Willis’ work, the main character in Lincoln’s Dreams is always short of sleep, running around breathlessly trying to avert some sort of catastrophe, and obsessing over tiny details that seem trivial at first but turn out later to be critically important. The story is fast paced, funny at times and poignant at others, and filled with appealing, earnest, very human characters and impeccably-researched historical content.

Willis uses the novel-unifying device of starting each chapter with a little nugget of information related to the story. She has done this before, too; in Bellwether, for example, each chapter started with a funny paragraph about some ridiculous historical fad. In Lincoln’s Dreams, each chapter starts with a little anecdote about General Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveller, who stuck with Lee throughout the entire Civil War. The vignettes are sweet and colorful, in themselves painting a picture of a tough-as-nails man and a tough-as-nails horse who were perfectly suited and devoted to each other. And the vignettes also turn out to be important to the plot—they are not just decoration. 

In Lincoln’s Dreams, our main character, Jeff Johnston, is a researcher working for a Mr. Broun, a novelist (some would say a “hack” novelist) writing a story set during the American Civil War. Jeff is perpetually haggard from traveling the country investigating the minutiae of Broun’s latest whims, and can’t ever get enough sleep to think straight. 

Jeff’s old college roommate, Richard, is a doctor working in sleep research. He calls Jeff because he has a patient/girlfriend, Annie, who has been having extremely vivid dreams about the Civil War, and she claims that the dreams aren’t actually her dreams, but are someone else’s.

Richard brings Annie to meet Jeff in the hopes that he will be able to prove to her that she’s not actually having the dreams of someone in the Civil War. But, of course, the more Jeff talks to Annie, the more he realizes that she is having the dreams of someone in the Civil War, and that someone is Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

She knows all the right details, like the kind of cat Lee had, and the messages that he exchanged with his troop leaders, and what he said at key moments in the war—none of which she knew about before the dreams.

When Jeff validates Annie’s dreams, Richard freaks out. Annie runs away from Richard to Jeff. Jeff takes Annie to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to keep her safe from Richard and also so he can finish his work on Broun’s galleys, which are of course due yesterday, in peace, and to try to figure out what’s going on with Annie. Annie also becomes interested in the galleys, and begins to help Jeff edit them.

They stay in Fredericksburg for a week, during which time Jeff realizes that the location choice is probably a mistake, because it was the site of a major bloody Civil War battle. Annie’s dreams become more intense, and Jeff stays up all night to calm her when she wakes and to prevent her from hurting herself, so soon both of them are (true to Willis form) worn out and addled from the lack of sleep.

The whole time, Jeff keeps calling in to Broun’s answering machine and getting messages, which are mainly from Broun and Richard. Broun is in California on a research trip and (also true to Willis form) is never there and has always moved on to another destination whenever Jeff tries to get in touch with him. Richard’s messages become more and more angry as he can’t get hold of either Jeff or Annie, and each time he comes up with a new scary diagnosis designed to get Jeff to bring Annie back to D.C. immediately (“she’s on the verge of a psychotic break”).

Jeff works out his own frustrations by yelling back at Richard’s messages in cathartic (and funny) one-way conversations. Jeff is furious with Richard for taking advantage of Annie—giving her powerful drugs and sleeping with her, a patient—and he expresses his rage in a way I’ve never seen Willis allow her characters to do before. Usually they are much more restrained and non-confrontational.

Annie’s dreams are confusing jumbles of past and present, with present-day people representing past people (for example, her boyfriend Richard always represents General Longstreet), but Annie can always make sense of it, and with Jeff’s knowledge of Civil War history, they confirm together that each new dream is, in fact, something that really happened to Lee. Jeff tries to figure out if the drugs Richard gave her in treatment caused them or affected them; whether they’re in chronological order; why she’s having them. Each time he thinks he has a handle on them, it seems to be frustratingly debunked.

Annie’s theory is that she’s having the dreams to help Lee atone: to assuage the nightmares he must have had about all the young men he sent to their deaths. But the more time goes on, the more Jeff starts to suspect that the dreams might be something more sinister, and that he and Annie might be in a race against time to figure out the puzzle before disastrous consequences result.

One of the great things about Willis’ best writing is that she creates parallels in every part of her story—and Lincoln’s Dreams is filled with parallels between the past, the present, and Broun’s book. Over time, Annie’s wrists begin to hurt her, just like Lee’s did after he broke one and strained the other at a key moment in the war. And at one point in Broun’s galleys a woman is reading, bent over her book so that Broun’s main character can see the part in her hair, when he realizes that he loves her. While reading this scene, Annie is bent over reading the galleys, and Jeff can see the part in her hair, when he realizes that he loves her. 

Lincoln’s Dreams is arguably less of a sci-fi novel and more of a bittersweet romantic tragedy, which may be why I wasn’t as drawn to it as I have been to many of her other books. But it is still an extremely well-crafted, endearing story with a ton of interesting historical color. It is also impressive in its very subtlety; Willis was able to create a science fiction story without resorting to actual time travel or space travel or any other concrete devices. And it’s particularly touching (in a way only Willis can pull off) to find out at the end the role that Jeff played throughout Annie’s dreams—a role that should have been obvious all along.