To Say Nothing of the Dog: a book review

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

I’ve just re-read To Say Nothing of the Dog. It’s one of my favourite novels by Connie Willis – one of her time-travel stories.

The book is, in part, an homage to the detective novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and others. In that capacity, the book itself includes the solution of a minor mystery. It is also littered with references to my favourite Sayers novel, Gaudy Night (including a similar romance), with a good dash of P. G. Wodehouse thrown in (and, of course, some Jerome K. Jerome, from whom the title is taken).

The “contemp” characters are wonderfully Victorian: “‘Oh, I do love country churchyards... They’re so delightfully rustic,’ Tossie said and hove into view, flags flying. ‘Not at all like our dreadful modern cemeteries.’ She stopped to admire a tombstone that had nearly fallen over... ‘I think it’s wonderfully unspoilt. Just like a poem. Don’t you, Mr. St. Trewes?’” (ch. 6, p. 107)

“Punting on the Thames,” Mortimer Menpes, 1906

The underlying theme of the novel, however, is divine providence. As one character (an Oxford professor) says (ch. 15, p. 256): “Through art, through history, we may glimpse the Grand Design. But only for a fleeting moment. ‘For His works are unsearchable and His ways past finding out.’” Everyone has their part to play in that Grand Design, although in the novel, as in life, the characters struggle to discover what their part may be.

Only at the end of the novel is one of the main characters able to realise that there was “A Grand Design we couldn’t see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers... And us.” (ch. 28, p. 479)

“Croquet Scene,” by American artist Winslow Homer, 1864

Connie Willis, who is a Christian, also explored a similar theme in Doomsday Book and Blackout/All Clear, but there the settings were a little darker, recalling Tolkien’s words “so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Ruins of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by fire in the Coventry Blitz (as Connie Willis points out, the reinforcement work described in the novel contributed to its collapse)

In spite of all the chaos and complexity, however, at last “There was a fanfare, the organ launched into ‘The Heavens Are Declaring the Glory of God,’ and the sun came out. The east windows burst into blue and red and purple flame. I looked up. The clerestory was one long unbroken band of gold, like the net at the moment of opening. It filled the cathedral with light, illuminating the silver candlesticks and the children’s cross and the underside of the choir stalls... Illuminating the cathedral itself—a Grand Design made of a thousand thousand details.” (ch. 28, p. 493)

To Say Nothing of the Dog received the Hugo and Locus awards in 1999. I’m giving it a rare five stars.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis: 5 stars