A reread this week. I must have first read this book some twenty years ago or so. The impression of it that lingers on is that it wasn't as good as its premise promised. A few months ago, I watched a video talking about the books of this author, and this book, so I decided to see if the premise, which sounds right up my alley, fares any better this time.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis C
This is the second novel in Connie Willis' Oxford Time Travel series. The first one was Doomsday Book. There is also a novella Fire Watch with some of the same characters that are in this book, and two further novels, Black Out and All Clear. All except Doomsday Book have something to do with World War II, though in this case, the main action is set in the countryside around Oxford in 1888. I've read the Doomsday Book, and this story. I DNF'ed Black Out and have not come across Fire Watch.
This entry is a first person narrated, mad-cap comic story written in the manner of those screwball comedy movies of the 1930's, with a silly premise, lots of fast, witty, sometimes nonsensical cross talk, and clever dialog. It also includes plenty of historical and literary references for your education and entertainment. It's a homage Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (Not to Mention the Dog) and a satire of upper-class Victorian Era England. I's also a mystery novel that recalls the detective novels of the 1930. And it's an intricate time-travel novel that explores the idea that small events play critical roles in history - the flap of a butterfly's wings which cause a typhoon in China. That's a lot of things. It's too many things. Oh, and its very long. The mass market paperback clocks in at 517 pages. It's too long.
The premise is that, in the near future when time travel is possible, an American heritress, whose ancestor in 1888 had an experience in Coventry Cathedral - the flap of the butterfly's wing - that led to the heritress becoming very wealth, now wants to reconstruct Coventry Cathedral down to the last little detail as it was on the day it was destroyed in the blitz of 1940, including a piece of decoration called "The Bishop's Bird Stump" - which is the story's MacGuffin. Using the promise of continuing funding the program, she has the time-traveling historians uncovering every detail of the cathedral, driving them to make more trips to the past than it is advisable. One of these historians inadvertently brings back something from the past. This should not have been possible, and thus, seems to threaten a cascading series of changes in the time-line that could affect large events in history. This needs incident to be repaired, even though time itself seems to have a means of doing so automatically. All very confusing.
The narrator is one of the historian who, as a side effect of too much time travel, is slightly gaga. He's sent back to 1888 in part to give him the two weeks he needs to recover from too much time travel, and to do something, that neither he nor the reader ever quite gets in his lala-first person narrative state. Unsure of who he is to meet and what to do in this time period, or where exactly to go to find his contact, he gets roped into taking a boating trip down the Thames with a fellow he meets who has the dog in the title, the homage to Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), which I'll now have to read. And from there the time plot slowly unwinds.
The premise of the story is silly by design. It's a comic novel, after all. It's silly enough for me, at least, not to care about the premise, and more importantly, not care about the problems of finding the MacGuffin, and fixing the problem with time. Since, as I said, it's a comic novel, after all. Screwball comedies run for something like 90 minutes. This book takes hours and hours to read - far too long for a screwball comedy - such that I found that the series of mad-cap comedy situations grew wearisome rather quickly. The mystery aspect was constantly being pushed back by the mad-cap situations and did not really come into play until after the climax of the story.
The mechanisms of time travel in this story, if you paid really close attention to them might have been semi-explained, and may have made sense within their premise, but you better pay very close attention. Take notes. Connie Willis did not write this novel on the fly. I am quite sure she had to have every little detail of the "slippage" in putting people in and out of time, worked out and written down since this slippage is the main way of measuring the damage to time. You'll need to do the same, if you care. I didn't bother because it made no real sense to me, i.e. whatever. Every time travel story never makes logical sense, if you bother to think about them. This means that despite all the thought and detail Willis put into the story, it still nonsense. It was all handwaving and mumbo-jumbo.
As much as I admire clever writing and prefer first person narratives, which this story had in abundance, I found the deliberate silliness, too much for my taste. It completely undermined the book's attempt to illustrate "the devil in the details" of history, and the seriousness of the situation with time.
And boy, did this story run too long for my taste - it ran on and on, even after it reached its climax. Indeed, by the end, I didn't care about the MacGuffin and the solution to the mystery or the restoration of the new cathedral, or the implications of the time travel premise of the story. I skim read the last 15% of the book - enough was enough. But as usual, that's on me. Your mileage may vary.
Back to time travel. Despite the comic nature of the story she tried to make the time travel stakes in the story seem very important - the changes caused by a person bringing something from the past back to the future might even change the result of World War II, unless this incident is somehow fixed. But this makes no sense. It never does. No "change" in history can ever be detected because that change would already be part of the history of the period it is being viewed from in the future. Which is to say that if they weren't Nazi time travelers, Germany didn't win WWII, and so they should have known nothing needed fixing, and that there was no need to worry at all. But the premise is that they did worry, and went to elaborate lengths to fix the "problem."
All time travel stories have logical flaws that must be overlooked if one is to enjoy time travel stories. While I could do that for the Back to the Future movies, they were not to be taken seriously, I usually can't overlook the flaws for time travel stories that want me to take them seriously.
In this case, it has has a number of rules for time travel. One is that you can't bring anything back to the future from the past, except... central to this story is that you can... as well as an number of others that I'm not quite sure about, given the mad-cap narration of this story. Now, I'm willing to turn a blind eye to sending people back into the past using "coordinates" that will land them at a certain date, time, and location within a margin of seconds, even though the earth is rotating, while it is rotating around the sun, even as the sun is rotating around the galactic center, as the universe itself is expanding, which would seem to make it extremely unlikely anyone could place a person back to the correct spot on Earth at any given time. Fine. But what I won't forgive is one of the central premises of this series is that time actively won't let itself be altered - correcting any change in the "Grand Design." Somehow. In this series, historians can not be "dropped" close enough to any pivotal event in the past that would allow them to affect the outcomes in any appreciable way. And when they are dropped far enough away and before any event - in time and space - they are still, somehow, prevented from interfering with these critical historical events. Unless you believe in either an active deity or that the universe is a video game, this rule makes no sense. The fact that universe has a natural law that prevents people from altering it suggests that humans, and their activities, are the central purpose of the universe, so much so that human activity itself becomes some sort of unalterable natural law that can't be violated. How? Who knows? The why, however is clear - to make the stories work.
As someone who greatly dislikes plot holes and stories written for the convenience of the author's plot, this story, and all time travel stories, are a hard sell for me because you need to turn a blind eye to the inevitable hole(s) in the logic of every time-travel plot. And in this case, the idea that apparently the intrinsic laws of time-space physics are so tied to human history that they activity operate to prevent it from being modified is several bridges too far.
So as you can see, I've had a lot to say about To Say Nothing About the Dog, without saying anything about the dog. Perhaps that's a sign for a good book, one that you should give a try. It is an ambitious book, well researched, and well written. You think about it. And I think that in my old age, my lack of patience may've well affected my view of this book. I'm pretty certain that I read it from page one to the end the first time I read it. Still, even back then, it failed to live up to my expectations. History, it seems, has not been altered.
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