
Anyone who followed the Morning News’s Tournament of Books this year (which I assume – possibly naively – includes everyone I know) may recall Nicole Cliffe’s judging round, in which she wrote, of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, the following:
“Station Eleven turned out to be the fiction equivalent of the 121st episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Kamala, played by the luminous Famke Janssen, is an empathic metamorph designed to adapt herself to become the perfect mate for an important diplomat. She winds up adapting to Picard, instead — it’s a great episode, you should watch it. And in this metaphor I am Picard, and Station Eleven is Kamala. It would be impossible for a book to be better suited for me. It is unfair that I have been placed in a position to evaluate its merits at all.”
This, in summary, is how I feel about a select handful of novels I have ever read, to which I return from time to time when I need a pick-me-up from all the shite the publishing world seems to think my life requires in it. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde leaps to mind, as does Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. David Copperfield, which has the most perfect ending it is possible to imagine any novelist ever constructing, is an obvious choice. Harry Potter will never not make me happy, and could only make me happier if the stupid Epilogue was replaced with something better. I’m not saying they’re the best books ever written; I’m saying they’re exactly the kinds of books my spirit craves. To this select pantheon of literary greatness, I now induct Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog.
How to summarise this book? It combines science fiction, historical in-jokes, literary winks, a detective story, and the genteel English screwball comedy of Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome. The astute among you may have already noted that the title is a nod to Three Men in a Boat, and in this novel three men do, indeed, take a trip down the Thames with a dog, in this case a bulldog named Cyril. If you can imagine Edmund Blackadder and Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia being required to correctly interpret cryptic historical sources in order to save the space-time continuum from total destruction, encumbered by the Empress of Blandings and a host of characters lifted directly from a child’s idea of Victorian England (including one with the marvelously Dickensian name of Lady Shrapnell), then you’re getting close to the feel of this book. It’s a glorious, generous, delight of a book, and it’s difficult to imagine any writer coming up with something better adapted to make me feel kindly disposed towards the world. This is one for the students of history in particular, but also for those whose hearts require periodic lightening.
A note: this book is actually part of a series. I haven’t read the others, but research conducted on the internet informs me that they’re tonally much darker, and that the Dog stands alone. I will, at some point (soon), read the others, but meantime I’m accepting this advice on its face.