In the middle of a conversation with another author about favorites books and re-readable stories, she mentions To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis and tells me that it, out of all of Willis’s other books, hit all her buttons (she does not use that exact phrase, but my memory is a sieve and I can’t remember her precise words though I took away their meaning).
I check it out from the library.
As I’m thumbing through the first pages, I stumble across the dedication which reads:
To Robert A. Heinlein
Who, in Have Space Suit, Will Travel first introduced me to
Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog
Instead of continuing on to the next page or going to get Heinlein’s story, I check out Jerome’s book from the library and start it instead.
It’s a hilarious novel slash memoir slash travelogue published in1889, part truth, part exaggeration, part make-believe, and rife with rabbit trails (aka ridiculous tangents which, to be honest, are sometimes a bit much). And it hits all my buttons.
When I’ve finished it, I then reopen Willis’s book and, this time, make it past the dedication page.
To Say Nothing of the Dog also hits all my buttons.
It’s a hilarious time travel novel in which the main character-narrator is sent to 1888 to recuperate from time-lag (think jet-lag but for time travel, an affliction which causes the sufferer to speak with sentimental expressions and/or poetry as one side effect and to need quality sleep as another). Naturally, he’s given one task to accomplish before he can settle into his recovery time. Of course, that one task isn’t so easy to accomplish.
The narrator is charming, funny, overworked, sleep deprived, and through his voice and the adventures and misadventures that occur the book references Dorothy Sayers (and her characters), Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, spiritualism, Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, the river Thames, the Victorian era’s trending items that are penwipers (also a main theme in Jerome’s book), and much, much more.
Willis/the book/narrator probably references Heinlein, but since I haven’t (yet) read Have Space Suit, Will Travel, I don’t know that for sure.
Getting to this book (or rather these books) reminds me of that game of six degrees of separation or the way the brain can run a labyrinthal path from thinking about what was had for dinner the night before and end up trying to envision string theory or the metaverse. Leaving one to think, “How did I get here?”
I guess when it comes to string theory everything is connected. One string touching or connected to another.
(I really have no idea how string theory works or even what it really is, except that it’s theoretical mathematics and way over my head, but I always imagine it as a bunch of strings that intersect and overlap like the children’s string game Cat’s Cradle or as strings which, sometimes, are wound together like a ball of yarn.)
All this to say, if Jerome K. Jerome hadn’t gone on a boating holiday with his friends and then written about it (with exaggeration and at the encouragement of his wife), Heinlein would have never done whatever it was he did in Have Space Suit, Will Travel which led Willis to read Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) and then write her own book in the style Jerome used (which includes silly, summary chapter headings explaining what each chapter will address) as well as using the parenthetical part of the title To Say Nothing of the Dog as her own title. If she hadn’t done all that, my author friend would never have read it, liked it, or recommended it to me (which doesn’t even get into all the strings that had to exist and connect for me to even be talking to my author friend in the first place). If she hadn’t done that, I would have been deprived of two books’ worth (so far) of delight and joy.
(And no one should be deprived of a book’s delight and joy any more than they should be deprived of sleep.)
Time travel stories, like trying to trace back how one gets from thinking about last night’s dinner to how string theory (whatever it actually is) affects the metaverse (whatever that is), always hurt my brain a little bit.
Can there be parallel time lines? What happens if a person meets their past or future self? Can history be changed? If so, which of the infinite strings of events is the one that will change everything? Can someone become a Time Lord after applying for citizenship to Gallifrey?
One of the many, great, beautiful benefits of books is that they make time travel possible. By simply reading a book and buckling in for the ride, I can time travel to nearly limitless locations and times. I can be in two places at once. The best part of it is, I don’t have to personally worry about time lags, slippage, penwipers, falling into the Thames, or ending up in the wrong time and destroying the space-time continuum.
And if I recommend a book, such as Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog, I can maybe extend the string yet another link. One more one-dimensional string moving through the glittering expanse of space and eventually connecting us all, strand by strand, to each other.
