Correcting the past

That's the trouble with books. They're timeless.

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

How can you travel into the past without changing the present? That question lies somewhere in most time-travel novels, but few writers deal with it as directly as Connie Willis does in her 1998 novel To Say Nothing of the Dog. Another in her series of novels about historians of the future studying history by going back into the past, this screwball comedy of a story has as its main focus an attempt to correct missteps made by other historians that might affect the outcome of World War II.

Seemingly incidental events can have big consequences, and so historians Ned Henry and Verity Kindle are sent back to 1880s England to return a cat and to see that the cat's owner, a girl named Tossie, marries the right man, a mysterious Mr. C. They know from a diary fragment that she is supposed to meet Mr. C on a certain date, but how can they bring them together when they don't know who Mr. C. is, especially when she is already engaged to marry another man?

This all gets very confusing for anyone who is not Connie Willis, but she maintains the comedy and the banter at such a high level that readers shouldn't mind too much. Not as satisfying as her later comic novel Crosstalk, this is nevertheless an enjoyable romp through time, with stops in the Coventry cathedral during the 1940 bombing, a medieval dungeon and elsewhere along the way.

The novel is filled with literary references to William Shakespeare, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and other writers. Ned even sees the three men in a boat that inspired Three Men in a Boat.

Willis also dips into metaphysics. Religion has been ruled nonessential by Ned and Verity's time — sort of how most governors and mayors regard it during the present virus — yet time itself becomes a mystical force that rules the universe. The "continuum wanted those things to happen," we are told.

Willis makes the same mistake made by a number of authors writing about the future — George Orwell, for instance — by not setting her story far enough into the future.  Our historians are from the year 2057, time travel was invented between 2013 and 2020 and cats became extinct in 2004. Apparently she never imagined people would still be reading her novel in 2020 and finding those dates laughable. That's the trouble with books. They're timeless.