By: Connie Willis Publisher: Bantam Average Rating: Binding: Mass Market Paperback Label: Bantam Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 512 Publication Date: December 01, 1998 Release Date: December 01, 1998
Product Description: From Connie Willis, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, comes a comedic romp through an unpredictable world of mystery, love, and time travel...
Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump. It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier.
But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right--not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.
Amazon.com Review: 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-traveling 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 immortalize Ned's fumbling. (Or, more accurately, Jerome will earlier immortalize 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. (Willis is happily unconcerned with futuristic vraisemblance, though Ned makes some obligatory references to "vids," "interactives," and "headrigs.") 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 realizes 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-traveling 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!
A fun and interesting romp -- eventually I have to admit that I almost put the book down after the first fifty pages, and again after the first hundred pages. After that, however, I was hooked. The first part of the book relies too much on slapstick and a couple of characters that are really caricatures (Terence, Professor Peddick). However, the book eventually finds its stride, introducing characters that are interesting, funny, and easy to connect with. Also, the plot, which plods along for the first part of the book, becomes more and more intriguing. This book really would have been excellent with some judicious editing of the first half, but I'm glad I finished it.
Wonderfully funny sci-fi To Say Nothing of the Dog is easily one of the funniest books I have ever read and the complexity of the "net" which allows the characters to travel thru time balances out the humor with a sense of dread and urgency. She does a great job of bring together actual historical events and making them relevant and recongnizable. I couldn't put this book down from the very beginning. Definitely a book to read for anyone who enjoys sci-fi.
Get the audio version! I can't add anything new to these reviews except to say that the audio version - narrated by Steven Crossley - was an absolute stitch! His accent and dead-on voice characterizations are worth the effort to locate the discs. You can also try your local library. You won't be disappointed!
Stumped By the Bishop's Bird Stump Ned Henry and Verity Kindle are historians from the second half of the 21st century. Their job is to travel back in time and study the past up close and personal. Ned has been stuck in 1940 for the past several weeks searching for a monstrosity called the Bishop's Bird Stump (which was located in Coventry Cathedral) for a wealthy patron of Oxford University and which was lost during the bombing of Coventry.
Verity finds herself in Victorian England (1888) and while there inadvertently brings something back to the 21st century that could change the course of history itself.
Now, Ned is sent to 1888 to help correct the timeline and get historic events back on track. There, along with Verity, both must not only figure out what has gone awry with history, but must also locate the Bishop's Bird Stump in time for the consecration of the newly rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in the 21st century.
To Say Nothing of the Dog is a wonderful old-fashioned mystery, awash with hints and clues throughout the book, yet the final puzzle is not solved (at the end, of course) until the characters use a path of logic way too complicated to ever to be fully understood...let alone determined by the reader before the ultimate denouement. And yet... the characterizations are extremely solid and the setting exquisitely detailed.
The main drawback to this book is that it took way too long for the plot to approach anything near interesting for more than brief half-page/page mini-spurts. Indeed, it took a full third of the book for the plot to begin focusing on the what the story was actually about (finding the Bishop's Bird Stump and getting history back on track) in a coherent manner that went beyond mere exposition. While exposition is generally a good thing and certainly necessary to construct a solid, focused plot, too much exposition, as in this book, can leave the story floundering to a point where some may just give up reading it entirely.
And that would be a shame... because once one gets past the first third of this book, one would see that it is a true work of art (even looking back on the first third) with an incredibly intricate plot, rich characters that one actually cares about and full of a literary "flavor" that one rarely sees in science fiction these days.
Most excellent Hmm. Let's see. This is kind of complicated. First of all, we've got a "historian", Ned, whose mission is to find something called the bishop's bird stump from Coventry Cathedral which was destroyed during an air raid in 1940. (There's a certain Lady who wants to have the Cathedral restored.) This isn't quite as simple as it should be, and to give him a break (traveling back and forth in time can give you a really bad "time lag"...) and to save him from the hands of the aforementioned lady - who does have quite tyrannical tendencies - he is sent on a very simple mission to correct one mistake of a colleague in 1888, where he is afterward supposed to spend some time getting rested. Of course, things start to get wrong here (even more wrong than they were, that is.) He happens to meet a young man who as a consequence of this meeting does not meet the girl he was going to marry. Instead he meets someone else - someone he wouldn't have met without this historian, and falls in love with her. Moreover, this girl just happens to be the great-great-great grandmother (I'm not sure of the number of greats there) of that aforementioned lady. (Here I couldn't help thinking that hey, here you've got your chance to get rid of the lady for good...)
This grandmother-girl in question is, of course, supposed to marry someone else, but funnily enough they don't know who. Even though this girl is an aristocrat, there doesn't seem to be any record of her marriage but in her diary, which conveniently is damaged so that all they know is that his name begins with C. I'm not at all sure how likely this is, but whatever. It's too small a thing to ruin a fabulous book.
All in all, it's a lovely mess. A cat plays an importnat role in it, and there's also a fake medio, an Oxford professor who keeps on sprouting quotes (mainly in Latin, naturally), and of course, a dog. Everything is, in the end, connected to everything. Much of the book consists of the main characters trying to keep the two lovebirds apart and finding out who this Mr. C is, though there are much... should I say "grander" things behind it all.
I thoroughly enjoyed the characters, and also Willis' portrayal of the Victorian society. As for the problem other reviewers have pointed out, Willis's use of American expressions... I'll take their word for it. I'm not a native English speaker, so I didn't notice anything... (I keep on happily mixing American and British expressions in my English, I know that.) In my mind, this is a well-written and very fun book, and I'm certain to check out what else Connie Willis has written. (Well deserved Hugo, I think.)
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