snpmurray's Full Review: Connie Willis - To Say Nothing of the Dog: How We ...
Hugo award winner, “To say nothing of the dog” is an eclectic wonder…part Historical romance, part mystery. Winding around ideas which are pure science fiction, Connie Willis spins an hilarious yarn. No-one could pigeon-hole this book as anything other than a wonderful work of literature.
The story takes place in essentially three locations, England, in the summer of 1888...Coventry Cathedral, during the wartime blitz, and Oxford University, time travel research labs, circa 2057.
Academic time researcher Ned Henry spends his time searching through 1940s jumble sales for “the bishops bird stump”, grotesque tasteless relic lost during the destruction of Coventry Cathedral during the blitzing air attacks of the nazis during WWII.
A strange assignment for an academic, you may think. Your opinion would be shared by the whole academic staff of the university, but unfortunately funding for time travel ain't what it used to be. As soon as corporations discovered they could not plunder artifacts from the past to sell off in the present ( the doors of time wont open when it would cause an incongruity), they withdrew funding. Lady Schrapnell, an eccentric billionaire steps in with money, but insists the university assists her in the resurrection of Coventry cathedral, in its original form, perfect in every detail. Most details are discovered by historians with sketchpads passing backwards and forwards, but the Bishops Bird stump is nowhere to be found.
Shrapnell harasses all around her deadlining rebuilding of the cathedral in Oxford for the 125th anniversary of its destruction.
Badly time-lagged from his many jaunts, Ned gets a vacation in Victorian England to hide from her, at the cost of correcting a little accident caused by colleague time-traveller, Verity Kindle. Verity is back there attempting to steal the diary of Schrapnells’ great great great great grandmother, Tossie, whose viewing of the Bishops Bird Stump changed her life.
Unprepared Ned and the beautiful Verity attempt to repair the rift she has caused, with increasing desperation, and widening consequences through time, dealing with a confusing array of nineteenth century characters, from a raving spiritualist, to a highly eccentric Oxford Don….to say nothing of the dog.
Their very presence in the past has dire consequences. They can hardly make a move without seeming to alter the known timeline. Added to this Ned is entirely unbriefed on the customs of the period. He blunders through Victorian custom, but basically could not distinguish antimacassar from antimatter. After all, who would have known that to mention that a cat was pregnant was blatant pornography?!
Can Ned and Verity prevent the space time continuum falling apart?
Where is the bishops bird stump? How did it vanish from the ruins of the cathedral, and who want want so hideous an object-d’art?
What is the connection between the stump and the space-time continuum, or indeed, any other happenings, that ever happened, anywhere?
All is revealed on a huge romp through time, and the perils of Victorian England!
The title is actually the subtitle of Jerome K. Jeromes “Three men in a boat”, and Neds’ first days in Victorian England are indeed spent boating down the Thames with two male companions and a canine. In a priceless moment, their boat in fact passes that of Jerome K Jeromes, and Neds’ reaction to Jerome is a “view from the other side” of a scene recounted in the earlier book. As Douglas Adams once observed, this is, of course, impossible. But it is certainly funny!
There are many lines in this book which made me laugh out loud. The stupefying nonsense that was Victorian manners are exploited for every ounce of humor they can yield….Neds constant anachronistic misunderstandings, coupled with his desperation to save all of space-time make for a constant stream of witty dialogue and incidents which delighted.
This work is also scattered with fascinating and learned examples of how trivialities throughout history have altered the course of events….Hitler having a migraine, and not learning about the D-day attacks till it was too late, for example. Other equally informative and well-placed commentary makes this book a wonder….I laughed long and hard to learn that upon reading “Alice in Wonderland”, Queen Victoria wrote requesting Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) send her his next book. He promptly forwarded her a copy of his newly-published treatise on advanced mathematics! For me, asides like this make a book priceless.
This book is hampered almost by the fact that it attempts to contain a mystery, but is dealing with time travel. This permits any arrangement of facts to be completely re-ordered, willy-nilly, any time, by the mere introduction of more time paradoxes, which might solve other problems, or indeed the same problems only a week last Thursday. This can get a plot out of whatever knots it may have tied itself in. Such an advantage is not well suited to a mystery, and I felt very much that towards the end of the story, Willis was cheating her way out of the plots convolutions by just such a means. I am not revealing anything in saying that ,for me, it all got a bit “Scooby Doo” towards the end, with facile “revelations” …..it felt a bit thrown together at the last minute.
Considering this is soft (almost talcum-powder soft) science fiction, the main protagonists are rather two dimensional. The supporting characters are in fact much more fleshed out and entertaining.
Tossies father, and the Professor, and their shared obsession with the Globe-Eyed Nacreous Ryunkin (a goldfish, I am led to understand) was the funniest picture-portrait of ridiculousness I have had the joy to read this year!
Oh yes, and you will have solved the mysteries long before they get solved in the book.
This book is utterly charming, and intelligent and funny. Enjoy!
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