To Say Nothing of the Dog

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a science-fiction fantasy in the guise of an old-fashioned Victorian novel, complete with epigraphs, brief outlines, and a rather ugly boxer in three-quarters profile at the start of each chapter. Or is it a Victorian novel in the guise of a time-travelling tale, or a highly comic romp, or a great, allusive literary game, complete with spry references to Dorothy L. Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle? Its title is the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome's singular, and hilarious, Three Men in a Boat. In one scene the hero, Ned Henry, and his friends come upon Jerome, two men, and the dog Montmorency in--you guessed it--a boat. Jerome will later immortalise Ned's fumbling. (Or, more accurately, Jerome will earlier immortalise Ned's fumbling, because Ned is from the 21st century and Jerome from the 19th.)

What Connie Willis soon makes clear is that genre can go to the dogs. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a fine, and fun, romance--an amused examination of conceptions and misconceptions about other eras, other people. When we first meet Ned, in 1940, he and five other time jumpers are searching bombed-out Coventry Cathedral for the bishop's bird stump, an object about which neither he nor the reader will be clear for hundreds of pages. All he knows is that if they don't find it, the powerful Lady Schrapnell will keep sending them back in time, again and again and again. Once he's been whisked through the rather quaint Net back to the Oxford future, Ned is in a state of super time-lag. The only way Ned can get the necessary two weeks' R and R is to perform one more drop and recuperate in the past, away from Lady Schrapnell. Once he returns something to someone (he's too exhausted to understand what or to whom) on June 7, 1888, he's free.

Willis is concerned, however, as is her confused character, with getting Victoriana right, and Ned makes a good amateur anthropologist--entering one crowded room, he realises that "the reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over." Though he's still not sure what he's supposed to bring back, various of his confederates keep popping back to set him to rights.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a shaggy-dog tale complete with a preternaturally quiet, time-travelling cat, Princess Arjumand, who might well be the cause of some serious temporal incongruities--for even a mouser might change the course of European history. In the end, readers might well be more interested in Ned's romance with a fellow historian than in the bishop's bird stump, and who will not rejoice in their first Net kiss, which lasts 169 years! --Amazon.com

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connie willis' best - Rated
This was the first book by Connie Willis I read, and it was recommended to me because of other purchases (e.g. Jasper Fforde).

This is a brilliant, fascinating read. You are hurled into the action, and understand very little as the story progresses. Fortunately, the protagonist shares your confusion.

This is a very successful blend of science fiction, historical novel, romance and satire, and will be loved by anyone who enjoy genre mixing.

victorian age meets the future - Rated
As Ned Henry is sent back to victorian times to right a wrong (one created by the people of the future), he is highly time-lagged. As the traits of the that time-lag include a tendency towards flowery speech and hearing impairment, it is felt that he will fit right in. At least there he will be able to recover from his all-too-many trips back into the past.

The nyiad of his heart Verity turns up there as well. Things could not have been better for good old Ned. But not so.

Connie Willis manages to enthrall her reader (ie myself) all the way through the book. This is not a high-action book with explosions and death on every page. Instead it manages to gently make fun of people in all eras. There is action and tension and that too is kept well within a gently comedic sphere.

I loved this book and have read it before. It was not lessened by a second reading, unlike too many of the other books that I have read.

God is in the details - Rated
This is a book about details and minutiae, so it's a shame that Connie Willis fluffs quite so many of them.

Certainly it's amusing, but it runs on too long, and well before the end the misplaced Americanisms irritated this British reader. It may be Amazon's fault since they are selling the American edition; perhaps a British editor would have caught and corrected some of the slips.

For instance (p480): "Take Parks Road to Holywell and Longwell and then turn south on the High and turn off onto Merton's playing fields". That's Holywell *Street*, Connie, and it's Longwall not Longwell, and you'd turn left not "south", and it's just too bad that the field named "Merton Field" on your map isn't (and never has been) Merton's playing field, but never mind...

A detailed plan of Coventry Cathedral at the front and a harmless, necessary cut of 100 pages or so might have helped too. Otherwise I quite liked it.

Dazzling time travel fantasy - Rated
In the 2040s, time traveller Ned Henry has been charged with the unenviable task of helping to recreate old Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed in the Blitz. He has to search for a bizarre object called the Bishop's Bird Stump, an ornately carved font, which is vital to the recreation of the cathedral. Complications arise when a fellow time traveller, Verity Kindle returns from the Victorian era inadvertently bringing a cat with her (cats are extinct in the 2040s).Ned has to jump back to Victorian times to help her put things right before history is irretrievably altered. Things get even more complicated when a charming but exasperating young Victorian lady called Tossie becomes engaged to the wrong person, and Ned and Verity have to try and get her matched up with the right one. But who is the right one? This book has a very complex and ingenious plot, interesting characters, and lots of humour. Will you guess the identity of Mr C before it is revealed? utterly gripping from beginning to end. i dropped my copy of this book in the bath and ruined it, I had to order another one, but it was well worth it. And I wish I had a Bishop's Bird Stump!

*Nearly* perfect - Rated
This book is a hoot! Time-travel romantic comedy, with literary allusions stirred in to taste. Most of the characters are stereotypes, but not badly-done, and I'm glad she's rationed the effusions of the mawkish Victorian maiden.

I could guess some but not all of the plot, and when I realised who the Victorian maiden was going to fall in love with—and why she had an aesthetic epiphany about the bishop's bird stump—I was hugging myself with delight as I saw the plot unreeling before me. In fact, like the ideal of a Golden Age mystery novel, it's very fair in putting out the clues, but for a lot of the time the reader is as bemused as the characters.

There are a succession of very Wodehouse-esque butlers who manage to be entertaining (in a dignified manner) throughout.

Animal-lovers will also enjoy this story; Willis has a light but accurate touch with both the dog and cat characters, and the reaction of the time-travelling protagonist to hearing his first purr is particularly nicely done.

There is only one thing that seriously annoys me about this book, which is the poor use of British English. It won't necessarily annoy the sort of Americans who aren't aficionados of British culture, but I'm not sure if they're the intended audience. Also, younger British people may well have watched enough American films and television that American turns of phrase come naturally to them. Any Brit of 30 or older, however, may be slightly jolted out of the willing-suspension-of-disbelief approximately once per page by the American usages (and let's face it, in this sort of fantasy-pastiche-comedy the w.s. of d. needs careful handling). I spent the first half of the book wondering if the protagonist was meant to be an American, then decided that the language was meant to be future-UK-English-more-influenced-by-American-than-at-present, and finally realised that she hadn't quite got it right when, in the Victorian setting, the peppery old Colonel, the credulous matron and the eccentric old Professor all use American turns of phrase. It's distracting because, in a time-travel story, anachronisms and social or verbal details are often part of the plot. She's done very well with a lot of it: verbal tics appropriate to the ex-military old gentleman, the Professor with a monomania, the poetic young gentleman and the mawkish maiden are all put in—which means it startles the reader when they all use 'gotten' and 'go [verb]' instead of 'go and [verb]'.

I don't think it's the business of the writer to Know Everything, of course, but it's sad to see a flaw like this getting in the way when a decent copy-editor could and should have fixed it—and God is in the details, as one of the characters remarks, and the writer should be aiming at affectionate-hommage rather than a theme-park version of British culture.

I'd give it five stars (not timeless-lit-classic but excellent-example-of-its-kind) if I wasn't so annoyed by the distracting language.