To Say Nothing of The Dog - Plot Introduction

Plot Introduction

The story begins in 2057 at Oxford University. A machine which makes time travel possible has been developed, but time travel itself is used primarily as a tool for historical research. Although millions were spent to develop time travel as a commercial venture, it turned out to have no profit potential. The natural laws of the "time continuum" prevent anything of significance from being brought from the past to the future, and also act to keep time travellers away from historically critical events, such as the Battle of Waterloo. Any attempt to break these laws result in the time machine preventing the desired goal of travel: the time traveller is sent to the right time but to a distant place (30 miles from the Coventry Cathedral, or Mexico, to give two examples in the novel) or to the right place but a time distant enough to keep the traveller from interfering in a way that might create a paradox (the narrator reaches the Cathedral but in the year 1395). In extreme situations, the continuum can correct paradoxes by changing the course of events in minor ways to keep the eventual outcome the same.

The novel opens just as one time traveller appears to have violated the laws of the continuum by bringing a cat from Victorian times to 2057.

The background to the story is that Lady Schrapnell, a wealthy American neo-aristocratic woman with a will of iron, has dragooned most of Oxford's history department to help her rebuild Coventry Cathedral exactly as it was before it was destroyed in the Nazi Blitz during World War II. (The post-WWII cathedral has itself been deconsecrated and demolished to make way for a shopping center.) The project is beset both by protesters who think the money could be better spent elsewhere and by Schrapnell's own insistence that "God is in the details."

The one remaining detail is the "Bishop's bird stump", a large piece of Victorian bric-a-brac. (The exact nature of this item isn't revealed until late in the book.) As the story begins, a team of Oxford historians is sent to Coventry just as the crucial air raid begins to determine whether the bird stump was in fact in the Cathedral at the time.

Complicating the effort is the fact that the British knew about the Coventry raid in advance, thanks to the decoding of the Nazi Enigma machine-encoded message by a similar machine in the possession of the British. The knowledge was withheld because the German High Command would have changed the code if they had suspected that it had been broken. The code-breakers were able to supply valuable intelligence later in the war, so anything that compromised the secret, including an interloper from the future, might change the course of history. At first it seems that the paradox is related to the Victorian era, but it relates to the Enigma code.