Harry Turtledove and Judith Tarr’s Household Gods is a well-written book that always annoys the heck out of me. I thought about it after finishing Them Bones and wondering what other stories have time travel that don’t achieve anything.
Nicole Gunther-Perrin is a lawyer in Los Angeles, and she’s the most irritating person you could ever spend a whole book with. Usually when fans call people “mundanes” in a sneering way it makes me recoil, but in Nicole we have a character who truly is mundane, or even a caricature of a mundane. She has no curiosity, no education (about anything other than her specialty, law), no idea how anything works, and poor social skills. Worst of all she’s so self-centered you can hardly escape her gravity well.
She needs to be like that for the plot to work—divorced with two little kids, passed over for promotion, she prays to the Roman gods Liber and Libera, about whom she knows essentially nothing beyond their names, for them to send her back to their time. They kindly do, sending her back to the body of an ancestress, Umma, in Carnuntum on the borders of the Roman Empire in the time of Marcus Aurelius. There, instead of behaving like any other protagonist of this kind of novel, she freaks out at the lice, disease, death, invasions, and sexism, and longs to be back in California. In some ways, yes, it’s refreshing to have a time travel book where the protagonist doesn’t know everything about history and technology and invent ninety-eight things and save the day, but did it have to be the one where the protagonist is a girl?
The good thing about this book is the background. Nicole finds herself in the body of Umma, a widowed tavern-keeper in Roman Carnuntum. She’s given the ability to speak Latin, but nothing else. She has to come with Umma’s life and responsibilities and problems. Carnuntum feels real in every detail, the baths, the tavern, the lives and relationships and attitudes of the other characters. As a story about how people lived at the edge of the Roman Empire, it’s brilliant. That’s why I kept reading it the first time and why I have re-read it since. (The rest of it is so good that I tend to forget between times just how annoying Nicole is.) T. Calidius Severus the dyer, his son Caius, Julia the slave who is afraid to be freed, Umma’s children, her brother, her neighbours, even Marcus Aurelius—they’re all wonderfully real, and especially nice to spend time with because they’re not Nicole.
The problem with it is that ignorant selfish Nicole constantly gets in the way with her ridiculous attitudes. She sees a legionary soldier and thinks, “Didn’t Rome have a Vietnam to teach them about the horrors of war?” She has no idea that while in her own time there’s a glass ceiling, in the time she’s come to women are legally chattels of men. Her father was an alcoholic, so she’s horrified to see people drinking wine. I’d like the book more if I didn’t feel that the entire novel is set up for her to be as ignorant and annoying as possible and then Learn A Lesson. This is a personal fulfillment story, and indeed she learns a lesson and is personally fulfilled, but I still want to kick her. Some of the lessons she learns—about the army protecting the town, about wine being safer than water, about science and technology making the world safer and more equal—are obvious. Some others, such as the bit about the benefits of smacking children, are odder, by which I mean that I don’t agree.
Mild spoilers ahead. Though mostly they’re the kind of spoiler I got for Card’s Alvin Maker books when I discovered from external sources that William Henry Harrison was elected president and then died…
The account of the pestilence and the invasion and the famine are vivid and individual. This is the kind of writing that’s very difficult to do well, and Tarr and Turtledove carry it off perfectly—these are the kind of close up personal views of history happening that make it seem real. The same goes for the encounter with Marcus Aurelius, with his famous personal integrity. This is the kind of encounter with a “celebrity” that often weights a story in the wrong way, but here it’s excellent.
Now a couple of specific spoilers, but still fairly mild ones:
The thing about Nicole that I think best sums her up is that at the end of the book, when she is back in California, she goes into a bookshop to check whether she can really read Latin or whether the whole thing was a hallucination. She finds she can really read Latin. Then she goes out of the bookshop again. There she is, with the ability to look up the actual history and find out what happened next to people she saw what was for her literally yesterday, a bookshop where Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is very likely available, and she just walks out. This is typical of her whole attitude, even after the authors have piled calamities on her so that she has learned to thank people, and realize how nice hot showers, and doctors, and regular meals can be.
I remember a friend of mine complaining about Thomas Covenant, “Any of us would give our right arms to be in the Land, and he goes about moaning and he won’t even believe that it’s real.” That’s my exact problem with Nicole—she’s had this marvellous opportunity and there she is so passive and ignorant that I want to kick her out of the way and do it myself and prove that women can be Martin Padway and not all Nicole Gunther-Perrin. (Also, I have had headlice. They’re not that bad.)
We never learn what happened to Umma—she wasn’t in Nicole’s body, so where was she? Is she going to wake up the next morning in the lumpy bed with no memories of the last six months? Or what? I’d really have liked a hint. Also, I’d have liked a companion volume of “Umma spends six months in Nicole’s life” because I bet she would have coped just fine, though she might not have wanted to go home again.
The world really is excellent. The history is accurate, and the daily life is as accurate as possible. If you can put up with Nicole, it’s terrific.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
I’d like a story on the following six months of Umma’s life. She comes back to a very changed domestic world.
Her daughter and her lover are dead. Her slave, the most valuable thing she owned, is no longer hers, and is suddenly expecting pay and time off. Her family thinks she’s gone daft. Her relationship with her neighbors is changed. She’s got an unexplained bag of gold, and doesn’t know why. When people say “tell us about how you met the Emperor” she won’t know what they’re talking about. Her little restaurant is suddenly selling beer.
This book is a domestic story, but it treats the domestic changes that happen as unimportant.
Urgh. I know what you mean about the protagonist. As soon as she expressed shock – shock! – that Rome had slaves, I had to put the book down. (Even if she’s never picked up a history book, surely she’s at least heard of Ben Hur or Spartacus?)
My tolerance for idiot heroes is low.
But what happens to Nicole’s children? Isn’t she worried about them? Is she glad to get back to them? Did they even notice she was gone?
This is the kind of book I would normally like a lot, except for the part where I’d throw it across the room in about thirty pages flat.
Nicole doesn’t annoy me anywhere near as much as she does Jo Walton. Mostly, I think, because I’m a LA lawyer and deal with Nicoles pretty much every day. Even in the highly-educated people I deal with, there’s a pitiable lack of knowledge of history and even less interest. Household Gods remains a favorite for the very reason that Nicole is just a normal, unexceptional person. There are plenty of other books where the time traveler is able to MacGyver his or her way into bringing our tech back to the historical period, but most people I know couldn’t do that. I think the instantly adaptable people we always see in these books are the exception.
TexAnne: Spoiler! Their divorced father has to come back from holiday to look after them — in the real world she’s only in a coma for a week. She misses them a little, but surprisingly little, and she hardly worries about them at all, to her mind they’re safe in the future. In fact she survives because her four year old calls 911. They’re better children than she deserves.
Ursula: Yes, so would I. It was hoping I might get that, or a little of it, at the end of the book, that kept me reading the first time. Umma in LA would also have been nifty.
MichaelK: I don’t think the protagonist of this sort of novel needs to be supercompetent, but are the people you know really unaware that Rome had slaves? I think Nicole is worse than a normal unexceptional and well over into the self-centered and blinkered end of things.
Too bad. I’d have liked to read the Roman scenes, but the protag would totally put me off. If I wanted self centered and ignorant, I could talk to my SiL. ;)
I admit, I was one of the ‘couldn’t finish this’ readers, and had pretty much put it out of my mind. Your description reminds me of one of the Jane Austenish books (Confessions of a JA Addict?), where the protagonist, despite her supposed love of JA books, spends her time in the past either whining about the chamber pots or refusing to believe that she’s really there. Sigh. So what if you are in a coma and dreaming the whole thing? Enjoy the ride, damnit!
Pam Adams @@@@@ 7: Off topic, but you reminded me of the British miniseries Lost In Austen, which I really rather like because she doesn’t spend all her time whinging. She’s stuck in 1811 and she doesn’t necessarily adapt, but she’s willing to stick with it and see where it goes. She’s very aware that she’s in the past and that she could screw with the future (but that doesn’t stop her from sharing her lip gloss). She adopts their customs but only to a point (she sneaks out for smokes, snogs someone she shouldn’t, and kicks an arsehole in front of an entire ballroom). She not only understands the time period from Austen’s work but from paying attention in school. I highly recommend the British cut; the American version on is massively edited down (from 3+ hrs to 1.5).
A pretty random question, but isn’t “Umma” a name of semitic origin? If so, does that play in the story?
Linguistically ignorant: It doesn’t seem to be of semitic origin in the story. However, Jews are mentioned (once) in a relatively positive way, whereas Christians are thought of as being fanatical weirdos.
Irritating as I find Nicole, I too re-read this occasionally (did just last week). I don’t think having a satisfactory story requires that the protagonist be super competent, but it would have been nice if this one weren’t such an out-and-out straw person.
The protagonist was so ill-conceived I couldn’t even dislike her. She seemed like a set of convenient attitudes for the authors to bounce exposition off. I like some of Turtledove’s work and I have nothing against Tarr’s, but I rejected this book at high wall-denting velocity.
In terms of stories where time travel doesn’t achieve anything, there’s Poul Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early”, though that’s a short story and not a novel.
The protagonist was highly annoying. I eagerly put this book in the Half-Price Books stack when I was done. The setting is very nicely realized, though.
“…she’s had this marvellous opportunity and there she is so passive and ignorant that I want to kick her out of the way and do it myself and prove that women can be Martin Padway and not all Nicole Gunther-Perrin. (Also, I have had headlice. They’re not that bad.)”
Jo, I always enjoy your reviews, but this one is outstanding. Bravo!
I’d forgotten all about Nicole Gunther-Perrin, not to my loss, and have good memories of the novel otherwise. Such as the women dousing themselves with tanner’s urine to repulse the invading soldiers. A practical, if disgusting, strategy.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks, Pete Tillman
—
“In principle you could hypertunnel from a Zone B world, but in practice you can’t get the tech together. The evil rays revel in chaotic class-three and class-four zones.” –Rudy Rucker, story notes, Mathies in Love
In terms of stories where time travel doesn’t achieve anything, there’s Poul Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early”, though that’s a short story and not a novel.
And of course Alfred Bester’s “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed.”
For novels, there’s Jack Finney’s Time and Again. (The protagonist makes some changes but they are not particularly large.)
Sometimes whiney, irritating protagonists can work. I love the Covenant books despite him being an extremely irritating and at times nasty character. He does improve, marginally, as they go on I suppose.
And on the other hand, the protagonist of L. E. Modesitt Jr.’s The Soprano Sorceress is very irritating and dull. That was one slow book.
Perhaps it’s down to the author’s skill at character building. Or perhaps it’s just that The Land and supporting characters redeem the presence of Covenant!
This book sounds like fun, but I am afraid Nicole being a lawyer stretches my suspension of disbelief. I find it hard to credit someone that stupid would manage to graduate from a law school.
As for Thomas Covenant, well, those who complain he isn’t happy finding himself in the Land miss the whole point of him being a leper.
I really don’t think I’d get on with this one; books with idiotic lawyer protagonists irritate me more than most, since being a lawyer I’ve encountered a vast range of ways in which lawyers can be idiots, but the basic job description does entail an ability to retain a wide range of apparently irrelevant detail and synthesise it into patterns, which it sounds as though Nicole wholly lacks (though, come to think of it, you did say she’d been passed over for promotion…)
Anyway, on the “Romans had slaves?!?” shock horror thing, I’m reminded of the movie King Arthur (the Clive Owen one) in which the main characters (a group of Sarmatian cavalry left in Britain just as the legions are on the point of withdrawing) go on a mission North of Hadrian’s Wall to rescue a Roman family of high status from the villa they have built somewhere at a rough guess near Stirling and discover, much to their horror, that the Roman family are so debased and decadent that
a) they have “serfs” (sic) whom they flog; and
b) they consider the local non-Roman people to be barbarians who are less human than they are.
Legionseagle: Don’t even get me started on that film! Indeed, when I think about it, it’s more than enough to make me believe in Nicole’s total ignorance.
To be fair to her, she is actually good at pulling things together and making an argument, and she’s quite good at cooking too.
I thought about it after finishing Them Bones and wondering what other stories have time travel that don’t achieve anything.
As far as not “achieving anything”, goes, that’s a part that I rather liked. And what “anything”, anyway?
Unlike many time-travel stories, Nicole time-traveled into a position where she had real responsibilities. And she can’t/doesn’t abandon those responsibilities to try to do “real” things.
She had two children to raise, who had been raised to that point in a very different culture and with very different parenting methods than her own. She had a business to run, which required all sorts of skills that she didn’t have, and wouldn’t have learned the practical application of even if she’d done a lot of book-study of history. She had to live through and try to protect her household through a deadly epidemic. She had to live through and try to protect her household through a war, invasion, occupation and “liberation,” unarmed and without male protection in a world where male protection is everything.
And she succeeds, mostly, at these things.
There was little she could do to save her daughter from the epidemic – but that’s rather the point of the book having an epidemic. She does protect her son through the epidemic and the war.
Her business is still running successfully, despite her being thrown into it without knowing any of the recipes that the restaurant was known for, how the local currency worked, or what prices she should pay for products or how to bargain successfully.
The slave she found that she owned is freed, but not freed and abandoned, but rather established in a position where she is happy, protected, and better-off than she had been.
If Nicole had run off to try to do “real” things, Umma would have returned to a devastated life, finding that she’d abandoned her children and business.
I’m not sure that I could succeed at doing everything Nicole did when dropped into the past. Could I jump into running a successful small business, and not end up ruining it? Could I survive a war while caring for a small child?
Nicole’s achievements are domestic and traditionally feminine, but that is quite different from achieving nothing.
For “not achieving anything”, I guess it depends on how you define it. There was a Golden/Silver Age novel by…? DeCamp, Wellman? Somebody like that, about an engineer who gets propelled into Renaissance Italy and becomes Leonardo. Does closing the loop on our timeline count as “not achieving anything”?
DemetriosX,
The ‘time traveler becomes Da Vinci’ idea is also used in Heinlein’s The Door into Summer.
Pam Adams @23
The ‘time traveler becomes Da Vinci’ idea is also used in Heinlein’s The Door into Summer.
But only metaphorically. In the story I’m thinking of, it was literal. Modern engineer finds himself in Renaissance Italy and becomes know as Leonardo da Vinci, the same one we know today.
Funny, it was the description of the protagonist and her life in the ‘present’ that this reader found unbelievable, and even laughable. Why yes, I happen to know quite a few very successful attorneys who are also women, also mothers, also married or divorced, who work in everything from big corporate law to one-person, i.e. herself, firms. One of the things in particular that came so ‘off’ to me was how she dressed and what she called some of her items.
When our protag got thrown into the ancient world, that felt just fine, and was very interesting.
I’m still puzzling as to what if anything was accomplished by Galileo’s time travel in KSR’s Galileo’s Dream.
The story where a time traveler actually is da Vinci is Manly Wade Wellman’s _Twice In Time_.
He is unable to return to his own time and has saved the local ruler’s life.
So the local ruler creates the da Vinci identity for him.
Also, my “what the hey” momemnt in reading a story was in a story set in ancient Egypt.
The ‘story’ was the main character’s memoirs and his was a man of his time.
He stops the story to ‘defend’ slavery.
Why would a man of that time feel the need to defend slavery?
Answer, he wouldn’t but the author felt that he had to defend/explain Egyptian attitude toward slavery to the readers.
but are the people you know really unaware that Rome had slaves?
Not exactly the same thing, but as a report of historical confusion from a lawyer and a biology teacher, I once had a game of Botticelli break down when it turned out that the people I was playing with (the lawyer and biology teacher I mentioned) didn’t know the dates for either Charlemagne or Cleopatra. At all. As in, they didn’t know which historically preceded the other. (A later conversation with the biology teacher involved his asking “When were the Greeks?”)
There are a fair amount of reasonably educated middle class people out there with next thing to no historical knowledge at all — a few pictures of people dressed in armor or togas, but nothing concrete before, say, WW I.
DemetriosX: In The Door Into Summer a grad student called Leonard Vincent tested the time machine and didn’t get back, and the prof muses that nobody could have got from Denver to Italy in the sixteenth century — could they? So not metaphorical, but not solid either.
Jo@29:
Ooh, that’s a minor detail I forgot. It’s been a while since I’ve read Door. I was thinking that Pam Adams was referring to the hero going back and inventing things he’d seen in the future.
But it was MW Wellman’s Twice in Time that I was thinking of.
Also, I’d have liked a companion volume of “Umma spends six months in Nicole’s life” because I bet she would have coped just fine, though she might not have wanted to go home again.
I can’t see her not landing in a mental hospital within the first couple of days — for amnesia, first, and then they would probably find out who she believes she is.
She doesn’t know that she has a job that expects her to report at a particular place far from her home, at a particular time. (Does she know how to tell time?) Even if she did know that, she doesn’t know where her job is or how to read a map to get there. (Unless the gods give her map-reading along with ordinary reading, I guess.) Even if she knew *that*, she doesn’t know how to drive, which she could easily kill herself trying if she could manage to get the engine started. Luckily, she also has no idea how to start the engine or which key fits the car or even that a car can move without hitching some draft animals up to it first.
When she doesn’t show up to work, someone from work might call to find out why. She doesn’t know what a phone is or what it means when it starts making noise or how to hold it so that you can speak into it. If she did manage to get all that right by luck, she wouldn’t know that the voice coming out of it was human (a mistake people from preindustrial backgrounds actually make with telephones and radios, IIRC) or what that person was talking about.
If by some miracle she made it to work, she knows nothing about the law she was hired to argue about.
And everyone who knows her, including her children, knows that she knew all those things yesterday. Not knowing how to answer a phone is strange enough in an adult to get her evaluated for mental illness or brain injury, on which she will score quite poorly (having no idea what day of the week it is, who her own children or coworkers are, etc.)
Nicole-as-Umma gets away with a similar loss of life skills because she’s sole proprietor of a business and everyone else in her household is her property, so she doesn’t have to justify herself to them. And because there is no science of psychology or mental illness.
But there’s a *lot* of technology-using skills that Umma-as-Nicole would be expected to perform without thinking about them, relating to technology that Umma has never seen or even imagined — and whether she was an incurious clod or not, there’s no way she could have known about it even as an academic curiosity.
I have to say, I think Ursula has it right. Nicole was able to do so many things in the past that I *still*(I read the book in 2006) think about what I would do or be able to do in that circumstance. I’ve actually given the book to a couple of women who have liked it.
Nicole irritated the ever-living foo out of me, to the point where I have very little memory of the book besides the fact that I couldn’t stand her. It was a book I was excited to read, and the letdown was dramatic. I finished it, but in a grumpy mood.
Perhaps I should give it a reread with that knowledge, but I’ll probably just end up rereading the Masters of Rome books if I want a fix.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek. Nicole is still an idiot, though.
InGreek: I don’t think I knew that. But it was probably available two feet away from her on the shelf in English.
I agree completely. Nicole annoyed me so severely; she whined and complained and was superior in so many ways that I wanted to kick her as well. What makes the books worthwhile is the parts that have the other characters besides Nicole.
So, after binging on Pompeii and Herculaneum YouTube documentary videos over the past week, I just reread this book for the first time in years. As always, I skipped the entire self-serving, sniveling first and last sections of the book. I’m the single Mom of two daughters adopted from China. BTDT – and done a helluva lot better job, if I say so myself. Nichole is a grand champion whiner-baby. Worse – the book is now 20+ years old, and the “modern” descriptions haven’t held up well. AOL’s “You’ve got mail!”??!! Gimme a break.
Having lived 2.5 years in Pozzuoli, Italy, it’s the portrayal of life in Carnuntum that fascinates me. Skipping huge sections of gruelingly repetitive feminist text helps make this book still an almost engaging read. Not that feminism isn’t a good thing – it is!! But Nichole’s ignorance and self-centeredness is just so dam’ boring. Seriously? She doesn’t know what happens in Roman beast games?? Every time she actually does something kind of thoughtful – which isn’t often – you’re startled. Bottom line: Nichole is NOT a nice person, and her ex-husband is a serious jerk, but I honestly understand why he divorced her
Sigh. I so wish this were a better book. I came here to find out if the authors had ever written a short story followup – as in, what happened to Umma when she returned to her body after a year and a half of oblivion? Did LIber and Libera grant her any kindnesses? I’d even settle for a link to some fanfic. But – nada.