Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71127 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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-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

Synopsis
Ned Henry shuttles between the 1940s and the twenty-first century while researching Coventry Cathedral for a patron interested in rebuilding it until the time continuum is disrupted.

Customer Reviews

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.)

connie willis' best
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
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.