As I read Household Gods, I wonder if the authors—Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove—had sat down and planned to write a novel that would dissuade anyone from time travel. The main character, a divorced Los Angeles attorney, spends a significant portion of the book learning how to deal with the cultural shocks of living in second century CE Pannonia. There’s the constant stench, the slavery, the disease, the barbarians, the daily grind. The list goes on and on. If I had to fault this book for just one thing, it would be that the reader is told a lot more than they are shown simply because we spend too much time in the narrator’s head. Once I started to think of the book as a thought experiment more than anything else, I started to enjoy it a lot more.
We meet our protagonist, Nichole Gunther-Perrin, on one of the worst days of her life. Her kids are unruly brats. She gets no help from her ex-husband. Her babysitter quits. The car is making weird noises. She doesn’t make partner at her firm. And then the kids get sick. It’s a lot to heap on one person’s head and it’s clear Nichole is about to snap. She makes a frivolous wish to an “antique” votive of a pair of Roman gods. The next thing knows, she wakes up eighteen hundred years ago in the body of a Pannonian tavernkeeper. She’s lucky in that she is able to speak the local version of Latin and a very helpful slave, but that’s about all she has in her favor. She eventually gets her stride, but the town suffers a plague of measles and an invasion by the Marcomanni and Quadi.
It doesn’t take long before Nichole is disabused of her notion that life was simpler without cars and taxes. Her first day in the past she learns (painfully) that drinking wine is safer than drinking water and that giving kids a smack every now and then doesn’t hurt them much. Nichole spends most of this book in a state of shock at one thing or another, but she eventually does learn to become a stronger person. If she doesn’t stand up for herself, who will? I just takes an awful of words and whining for her to get there.
The book isn’t all bad, though it does spend a lot of time smacking the reader upside the head with the lesson that life in the past is dangerous and barbarous. Anyone who’s studied history will know this, if only in an academic way. But if you had the opportunity to explore the past, to talk with the people, to literally smell what the past was like, would you take it? I’ve read a lot of time travel novels in recent months, and I have to say the option is tempting. At least until I read Household Gods.
Hartley once wrote that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Boy, was he right. It’s easy to view history as a progression from the primitive to the modern. especially in the developed world. We don’t have slavery. Medicine allows us to live decades longer than we could even a couple of hundred years ago. We have laws that protect children. We don’t publicly execute people anymore and blood sports are illegal. We have laws that protect equality between the sexes. Looking at Household Gods, any reader should be grateful for those eighteen hundred years of progress. I, for one, am glad that I live now, rather than then. ‘Course, if I had lived then, I would probably be grateful I didn’t live in ancient Sumeria.