To Say Nothing of The Dog by Connie Willis

First of all, I think I have to make it clear that this book left such a small impression on me that I couldn’t remember its name when – only about 20 minutes after finishing reading it – I picked up my phone to type up a quick little blog about it…

I guessed the five following titles, all of which are close but none of which are bang on the money for the “droll” title of Connie Willis’ pleasant yet saccharine 1997 time travel novel:

And So Much For The Dog

Don’t Forget About The Dog

Not Counting The Dog

There But For The Dog

Not Forgetting the Dog

It’s actually called To Say Nothing Of The Dog and that title is a reference to Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K Jerome, a book I’ve never read and no one I’ve ever spoken to [while reading this book (i.e. my live-in life partner, my infant child and my dog)] has read either. (If you’ve read it, please let me know in the comments, ideally with an opinion as to whether or not it’s worth reading now )

Three Men In A Boat is one of those books that one hears of, but never about. A light comic novel from an ancient time about three men in a boat… It sounds, of course, awful.

Obviously no one has read it. Connie Willis, though, has, and so – it seems – have all of her massive loser 2050s time traveller characters.

Yes, To Say Nothing Of The Dog is a time travel novel, and even though time travel is an essential part of the plot and the time travel functions in such a way that anything that happens has happened, it didn’t quite tickle my time travel urges in the way that I had hoped it would.

As in the other Connie Willis time travel novel that I read – Doomsday Book – this one leaves a reader with two burning sensations: 1) “why has this not been cut down to a more appropriate length?” and (2) “why is an American writing about these awful places in Middle England that have been forgotten by the rest of the country for a reason?”

This one centres on a place even closer to where I “grew up” (I didn’t really learn anything meaningful until I was in my mid-to-late twenties) than Doomsday Book (which is set in the countryside outside of Oxford (where this one spends way too much time, too)), focusing on the West Midlands’ most INFAMOUS bombed out cathedral from the Blitz – that of the one in Coventry.

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In the present of the novel (the 2050s), a billionaire with too much time on her hands is having Coventry Cathedral – the one the Nazis destroyed in the Blitz – rebuilt in a field on the edge of Oxford.

In order to make the reconstruction as good and as strong as possible, she is using all of the resources of the Oxford University time travel department to go back to the Cathedral before it was bombed and find out exactly how it looked before the aerial incendiary assault began.

The way time travel functions in this world is that “historians” may travel only to observe – if the potential of their presence alters the space-time continuum (or whatever) in even a minor way, then the time travel machine will automatically alter where and/or when it places them in order to avoid this, which is known as “slippage”. In the event of an accidental major issue, though – a potential “incongruity” – the system and the team of historians are expected to do whatever they can in order to fix it as soon as possible, however as an incongruity is basically impossible and the system is able to self-correct anyway, there is absolutely no peril for the reader because even though the dim-witted 2050s Oxfordian post-grad time travel students seem to think there is a chance that the system might not right itself and the universe might collapse, it is very obvious that everything is in place to keep the world spinning…

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The major plot threads? One piece of decorative art from the Cathedral cannot be located in the present or confirmed as destroyed in the past, and the time travel machine is not letting people as close in time and space as they need to be to check the Cathedral on the night of the bombing itself. Also someone has brought a pet cat from Victorian England to the 2050s (when they are extinct) for a few days but then takes it back and they’re all worried this cat might have been a big problem (it wasn’t)…

When the happy resolution is signposted as inevitable from very early in the text, then the pleasure cannot come from any narrative tension, as any mild tension there is (i.e. how things will be resolved, rather than the possibility that they won’t be) is drawn out over this book’s incomprehensible length so that it becomes impossible to connect with.

Is there, then, intense characterisation and beautiful prose? No, there isn’t that, either…

There is light humour about dating in the Victorian era and very sub-undergraduate level philosophical debates around the nature of History and historicisation… and also lots of chat about various fish breeds and references to Victorian (and later) mystery novels…

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It’s all fine, sure, yes.

It’s not like it’s fucking unreadable shite, but there’s ultimately only a novella here, in terms of narrative, descriptive writing and characterisation (if that tbh on this last count – there are basically only three slightly different characters and all the people involved are wafer thin variants of these wafer thin vectors for a plotless plot)…

It’s fine, sure, yes… but at 500 pages a novel needs to either have something to say, say it beautifully and/or – at the very least – demand engagement from a reader through an interesting plot!

This is, then, maybe a book suited to reading over two incredibly long days spent half-cut beside a pool or on a beach, where there is nothing better (or more pressing) to do, and where still having hours left to read of this slow, pedestrian text when you’ve already spent twelve hours reading it doesn’t fill you with despair, or a momentary awareness of life’s fleetingness. (Now I’ve finished this novel, the future feels eternal again.)

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Yes, it’s not shit.

Yes, it’s not terrible.

But it’s mediocre and it’s fucking huge and I think, maybe, I’ve reached a moment in my life where I need to start giving up on books that don’t quite work…

It’s unlikely I’ll do that, though.

I can’t imagine myself doing it. The idea makes me nauseous. No, I won’t start giving up on books. Pity. I’d probably be happier if I could…

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It’s fine, yes. But as a two day read when you’re looking for something easy, not a two week one in moments found while travelling internationally and establishing a whole new era of one’s life, as I was doing.

Eh.