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Loading... To Say Nothing of the Dog; or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at…by Connie Willis
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I enjoyed this so much more because I had recently read Jerome K. Jerome's 'Three Men in a Boat'. I didn't really realize how much of an homage Willis had created until I paired the two -- even the visual formatting (chapter headings, etc.) is a la Jerome, and yet Willis manages to achieve her own unique style within the homage. And, though its set within the same future as Willis' 'Doomsday Book', which I read immediately prior, Willis' second foray is dramatically different from its predecessor (not a prequel/sequel relationship, but it is helpful in smaller details to read them in order). Where the first was grim, this is light and laughable and perpetually enchanting. Jolly good -- I thoroughly enjoyed it. 1   beserene | Sep 29, 2009 |  Despite all the great reviews, I couldn't get into it. I really didn't care what was happening in the story. (  ) jimmaclachlan | Sep 25, 2009 | In the future, we will have invented time travel. But since it is impossible to use this technology to exploit the past, it has ended up as a tool for historians, to investigate at first hand important events in history. Or, to be bullied by ladies of the realm into making excessive trips into the past, trying to ascertain minute details about Coventry Cathedral before its destruction during the bombing of Britain in World War 2, so that said lady of the realm can have everything exactly perfect for the dedication of the rebuilding of the cathedral. In particular, whether a Victorian atrocity known as the "bishop's bird stump" was in the cathedral when it was bombed. Suffering from time-lag (my favourite symptom was excessive sentimentality), our historian Ned Henry gets sent back to Victorian times to escape Lady Schrapnell's demands and to get some rest. And to help fix a potential rip in the space-time continuum, only he was so time-lagged he has no idea what he's supposed to be doing in the 19th century. Cue boating down the river in Oxford, rescuing eccentric dons who would drown each other over opinions, meeting the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, being introduced to Victorian morals, rigging seances, meeting the inventor of the jumble sale, and trying to rescue Princess Arjumand, a very cat-like cat. Another delightful adventure from the mistress of time-travelling tales, Connie Willis. (  )1 wookiebender | Sep 23, 2009 | Why I liked the book boils down to one simple aspect: the characters. I like Ned Henry and Harriet "Verity" Kindle, the time traveling historians. What’s obvious from when they meet is that this is their love story, but without the schmoop. I like love stories without schmoop. Perhaps that’s because, while I am fairly romantic myself, I’m not given over to maudlin acts of affection. So watching these two interact is quite fun. Full review at my blog: http://reading.kingrat.biz/reviews/to... (  ) KingRat | Sep 17, 2009 | Laugh out loud funny ( ) Jaylia3 | Aug 19, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0553575384, Mass Market Paperback)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! (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:55 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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