t first glance, To Say Nothing of the Dog reads like an enormously extended version of one of the hilarious talks Connie Willis has been giving for years now at various of the Ceremonies of SF. (The last this reviewer personally witnessed, when she toastmastered the 1996 Hugo Awards in Anaheim, Calif., was a fine exercise in wit, tease and suspense; all perfectly timed.) But a novel is not a speech, and a novelist is not a toastmaster; and if this book were nothing substantially more than a skit with elephantiasis, then one would have to say that, here, in the tangled interminable scree of a jape gone walkabout, Connie Willis's timing was
off.
And even at second glance, even after a week or so in which the virtues of To Say Nothing of the Dog gradually settle into the mind's eye, one does have to say there are some problems here. Though an awful lot happens at the surface level of events--for instance, there is an insufficiency of attentiveness throughout to the underlying plot, which gets picked upon only intermittently, like post-kitten knitting, and purled at. And despite the presence of a butler who reads Marx, Willis's vision of the late Victorian England of 1888--where and when most of this time-travelling tale is set--is nearly fatally benign.
A glance at the 1889 book whose subtitle Willis has taken as her main title--Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome--may be helpful here. Like other comic writers who flourished at the end of the 19th century--a roster which includes R. Andom, F. Anstey, Barry Pain and, just barely, P.G. Wodehouse--Jerome's take on the flush and seemingly contented rural imperium of southern England is anything but clear-cut. To begin with, none of the writers mentioned actually belonged to the comfortably indolent middle-class world they depict so mildly; and the world into which they place these characters--Three Men and the Willis book are both set on the Thames and in the Thames Valley between Oxford and London--no longer quite existed, as described, in 1888, if indeed it ever did. Jerome and his cohort were arrivistes in an establishment England already in decline, and they sensed that they had arrived too late. Their comic novels exhibit all the muffled resentments of the upwardly-mobile gate-crashing a cold feast, while at the same time they exude a confused though sometimes eloquent nostalgia for a world both resented and longed for, but which is already ago.
The resented but longed-for 1888
The pretense of collegiate sloth that generates so much of the humor of Three Men is precisely that: a pretense. Jerome and his cohort were desperately hardworking hacks; the sloth of the three men in their boat is a dream. And when she sets her time-travellers from 2058 in that slothful, dreamlike, resented but longed-for 1888, Connie Willis asks a great deal of us. She asks us to dream along with her.
The miracle is, we do.
Time travel, after all, is a body English of nostalgia; and Willis's cast--which inhabits the same post-disasters Oxford that frames her earlier time-travel novel, Doomsday Book (1992)--is very ready indeed for 1888. The protagonist has been sent there, alongside a fellow worker with whom he falls happily in love, as part of a project whose main goal is the recovery of the bishop's bird stump--a Victorian monstrosity you stick flowers into--which is complicatedly required to complete the decor of the newly reconstructed Coventry Cathedral, now in Oxford. The bird stump had resided in the original edifice until the German raid on Coventry in World War II, when the cathedral was destroyed; at which point the stump fell out of time.
The mysteries of Time itself
Around this central point, the plot thickens and twists down the Thames like dream toffee you can't ever get into your mouth all at once; and before novel-end we learn that everyone has been barking up a plethora of wrong trees. A mysterious rectifying process, buried deep in the mysteries of Time itself, has been twisting events into an entirely unexpected shape, and incidental crises--the loss and rediscovery of a small cat, the elopement of a spoiled daughter of the middle class with the Marx-quoting butler, and much more--turn out to have been little more than spindrift.
But it is precisely that spindrift we come to love, as we remember To Say Nothing of the Dog down the line of time. Willis's style, in truth, does not much resemble Jerome's, for he is a deceptively concise writer, and much of the pleasure of Three Men in a Boat lies in discovering how seeming digressions --at times almost Tristram Shandy-like in their elaborations--whip back into the main driveshaft of story. To Say Nothing of the Dog much more closely resembles, in its mise-en-scene and characters and unsugary sweetness of nostalgia, a P.G. Wodehouse tale with the stays loosed.
We know it's untrue in the end. We know the writers who becalm and salve us with visions of Eden 1888 never themselves lived there. We know all this. We know there's always a Ripper in Eden. But we also know it is a privilege to dream.
Connie Willis, like Jeeves, gives us a dream, for a while, without Jack.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as well as one of the co-founders of the British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Omni, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Look at the Evidence, was nominated for the 1997 Hugo Award.
