Recent reads

Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis.

Two very different books based on the premise of an Oxford University scientific team discovering a means of time travel and using it for historical research.

Doomsday Book, published in 1992, relates the story of Kivrin (Engle?), a student of medieval history who travels back in time to further her studies. Unfortunately, things get complicated. She becomes deathly ill shortly after arriving. Worse yet, due to an error in the time-travel process, instead of arriving in a relatively safe time that she can observe without major hazard to herself, she's arrived immediately prior to the onset of one of Europe's worst outbreaks of the dreaded Black Plague.

Willis does a wrenchingly good job of portraying the less pleasant aspects of medieval life and the brutal impact of the Plague on the people and society of that time. This is juxtaposed with the modern-day impact of an influenza epidemic that strikes 21st-century Oxford while Kivrin is "away", and complicates the efforts of her friends and co-researchers to rescue her from the unexpected hazards of her assignment.

To Say Nothing of the Dog, published in 1997, takes the same basic premise and plays it for satirical effect instead. The Oxford time-travel program has been effectively hijacked by Lady Schrapnell (!), a wealthy donor obsessed with rebuilding the cathedral in Coventry which was destroyed by a German air raid in World War II. A stickler for perfection, she insists that every detail be exactly correct, every single piece of decor exactly reproduced, every possible surviving piece of ecclesiastical furniture found and retrieved. Unfortunately, a particularly ugly piece of Victorian frippery known as the "bishop's bird stump" has so far eluded her, and the deadline for the dedication of the rebuilt cathedral is rapidly approaching. It's a crisis!

Our intrepid protagonist, Ned Henry, is a researcher who's suffering from the effects of a few too many time-hops taken too close together. This tends to result in mental vagueness and eccentricity. But no matter! Lady Schrapnell insists! The Bishop's Bird Stump MUST BE FOUND!

Willis has great fun playing with the comical possibilities of time travel, the culture-shock of modern men and women attempting to explore the Victorian era without calling undue attention to themselves, and the impossibly convoluted complexities of just how a time-traveller's actions may or may not affect the course of history. In the process she delightfully weaves in bits of Wodehouse, Sayers, and of course Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, to which she alludes in the title. Victorian social classes, dogs, cats, scholars and icthyophiles all receive sharp and well-placed satirical jabs. Not to mention the status of women, the eccentricities of rich egomaniacs in all eras, and the omniscience and omnicompetence of The English Butler. It's great fun from beginning to end.

I must thank Fiend for provoking me to move these books to the top of the daunting and ever-growing pile of Books To Be Read. After reading To Say Nothing of the Dog, I can, perhaps, understand the trepidation she once expressed about the prospect of going boating. Also, her comments about the possible viciousness of swans.