To Say Nothing of the Dog

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To Say Nothing of the Dog

Author	Connie Willis
Country	USA
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction Comedy
Publisher	Bantam Books
Released	1997
Media Type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	512 pages
ISBN	ISBN 0-553-57538-4 (Paperback)

Connie Willis's 1997 science-fiction comedy novel To Say Nothing of the Dog returns to the same universe of time-traveling historians she explored in her Doomsday Book. The tone couldn't be more different, however. Doomsday Book was serious, even somber in places. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a cheerful comedy, extrapolated from the classic book Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, whose original subtitle it borrows for its own title.

[edit] Setting

The story takes place in 2057. Lady Schrapnell, a wealthy American neo-aristocratic woman with a will of iron — the character is not unlike the terrifying aunts who bedeviled poor Bertie Wooster in P. G. Wodehouse's comic stories — has decided to rebuild Coventry Cathedral exactly as it was when it was destroyed in the Nazi Blitz during World War II. By contributing a huge sum to the time travel project, she has essentially taken it over for her research on the cathedral and is happily working the staff to death in an effort to recover every last detail needed for historical accuracy, her mantra being "God is in the details".

By this time the post-WW2 cathedral, which replaced the medieval structure, has itself been de-consecrated and sold for re-development. Lady Schrapnell wants to build the replica of the medieval church in Christ Church Meadow, Oxford, spending 50 billion pounds in the process. The project is thus beset by protestors from Coventry and Oxford, and by anyone else who believes that the money could be better spent in other ways.

One key piece eludes her: a large piece of Victorian bric-a-brac nicknamed the "Bishop's bird stump", although it is in fact a cast iron urn, and hideous to boot. This item disappeared from the cathedral during the air raid, and for some reason time itself refuses to allow the historians to arrive when they could photograph and measure the thing.

Complicating the effort is the fact that the Coventry raid was known about in advance, thanks to the decoding of the Nazi Enigma machine code. The knowledge was withheld because the German High Command would have changed the code if they had suspected that it had been broken. The code-breakers were able to supply valuable intelligence later in the war, so anything that compromised the secret, including an interloper from the future, might change the course of history. At first it seems that the paradox is related to the Victorian era, but later it becomes more apparent that it relates to the Enigma code.

[edit] Plot

Readers searching for a linear plot — or indeed any plot at all — tend to find this novel frustrating, as the author takes every opportunity to distract and digress. Conversations are usually interrupted by other people with peculiar obsessions, and even the parties to a conversation frequently fail to listen to each other. Events lurch from one seemingly irrelevant incident to another, but at the end a Grand Design becomes apparent.

The protagonist, Ned Henry, is a specialist in 20th century history, assigned to search for the Bishop's bird stump. He has made so many jumps into the 1940s in a short time that he has developed a form of disoriented exhaustion the project calls "time-lag". He returns to the 21st century seeking rest only to find an emergency in progress. An historian sent to the Victorian era has committed an extremely dangerous act that just might snowball into paradoxes capable of ending all time travel or even ripping time itself apart. The exhausted Ned, who knows virtually nothing about the 19th century, is the only one available to hurry back to Queen Victoria's England with instructions to save the universe.

Unfortunately, even after he gets some sleep and his head clears, he can't remember what the instructions were. He does manage to meet Terence St. Trewes, a besotted young Oxford undergraduate who is short of money to hire a boat for a trip on the River Thames from Oxford down to Muchings End, where the would-be lover hopes to meet the object of his affections. Mistaking Terence for his contact in 1888, Ned supplies money and goes along with Terence and his dog Cyril, picking up Terence's tutor, the eccentric Prof. Peddick, along the way. Navigating locks, beautiful scenery, crowds of languid boaters in no hurry to get anywhere, and the party of one Jerome K. Jerome (to say nothing of the dog, Montmorency) they travel down the Thames.

Miraculously Ned arrives exactly where he needs to be, finding his contact in Muchings End playing the part of a distant cousin to Tocelyn "Tossie" Mering, a vapid young lady who is both Terence's obsession and an ancestor of Lady Schrapnell. Another historian, Verity Kindle, was sent by Lady Schrapnell to read her ancestor's diary. Tossie wrote that some event at Coventry's St. Michael's Church, which later became the Cathedral, had changed her life and sent her to America, sparking Lady Schrapnell's obsession. Verity's mission was to determine if the diary, which was mostly illegible in the 21st century, had mentioned the Bishop's bird stump.

In the process Verity brought a cat from 1888 to 2057, breaking all the rules of time travel. Ned was supposed to return the cat. Despite his best efforts he has succeeded, the cat having travelled with him in his baggage. Now he and Verity have to discover what, if anything, has happened to cause a problem in the time continuum. It is clear that there is a problem, since trips to Coventry in 1940 are putting people in the right place at the wrong time, or the right time but miles away in the middle of a field of marrows.

They also realize that, according to the diaries, Tossie is soon to marry someone identified only by the initial 'C', and there is nobody around who fits. Have they changed history by bringing Terence to Tossie? What will happen to them if Lady Schrapnell is never born, to say nothing of Terence not marrying Peddick's niece Maud, and thus not becoming the grandfather of an RAF pilot who bombs Berlin and goads Hitler into bombing London and Coventry?

The solution involves the wisdom of Sherlock Holmes, the methods of Hercule Poirot, and the style of Lord Peter Wimsey. In the meantime, Ned, Verity and their colleagues have to deal with packs of dogs guarding the marrows, hostile theatrical costumers dragooned into operating the time machine, phoney spiritualists, kittens, abstruse mathematics, the Battle of Waterloo, the unalterable fact that the butler did it (they always do), the Coventry Ladies Altar Guild, more dogs, and a crime which was committed before anyone realized it was against the law.

[edit] Trivia

The true nature of the "Bishop's bird stump" is not revealed until late in the book during a trip to Coventry in 1888. There Ned tells Verity how, in the 1920's the Ladies Altar Guild suggested buying a "bird stump" but, because of a money shortage, the bishop decided that a Victorian urn stored in the cellar would do. This became the object known initially as the "Bishop's idea of a bird stump", and later the "Bishop's bird stump".

Ned refers to it as a "firugeal urn", a puzzling reference which is repeated several times, and is unlikely to be a misprint. The correct description is probably a "figural urn", a type of vessel which is easy to find for sale online, several instances of which show how ornate, or hideous, the style can become. It has been speculated that Connie Willis found the misprint somewhere and used it, tongue in cheek, for its exotic appeal.

It is also possible that Willis drew inspiration from the Waterloo vase, a monstrous marble urn weighing over 20 tons, which passed from one unwilling keeper to another until finally a home was found for it in the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

The character and name of Lady Schrapnell may be a reference to the character of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.