To Say Nothing of the Dog

In this book and others, Connie Willis writes of historians for whom time travel is a routine procedure. The originating period for the travelers in To Say Nothing of the Dog (written in 1997) is in the 2050s, well after the academic discovery of time travel in 2013, and the story begins in media res in 1940, but most of the chapters take place in 1888.

Like the only other Willis book I have read (Bellwether), this novel was for me a romantic comedy with sf features more than the other way around. The discussions of fate and free will, of the role of individual decision, and the puzzling of temporal paradoxes were all adroit and engaging, but I felt like the propulsive tensions of the book, and its moments of greatest intensity, really show more stemmed from its amorous matchmaking.

As far as the theory of time travel is concerned, the story very much avoids any sort of "many worlds" system of diverging timelines. The "continuum" is practically personified, spoken of by the historians as if it had conscious agency in its homeostatic functioning. It was almost like another name for God, in a book where none of the characters--whether from the 2050s or the 1880s--seemed to think in explicitly theological terms, despite it centering on a cathedral along with a humorous subplot about Spiritualism.

Literary allusions abound, to The Moonstone, Alice in Wonderland, Agatha Christie, Wodehouse, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others. Now that we are well past the dates of many of the events anticipated in Willis' fiction here (including "the Pandemic" sometime between 2000 and 2013), this fiercely clever book's intertextuality keeps it "real" somehow.

This novel is the second in a series, and I haven't read the first. But I honestly felt more disadvantaged from not having read Jerome K. Jerome's Victorian Three Men in a Boat, to Say Nothing of the Dog than from having skipped Willis' Doomsday Book. And surely one should be able to read a series about time travellers in any order. I did like this one well enough that I expect I will eventually get back its predecessor. show less

Book club pick ☺

I have always been fond of Three Men in a Boat. It is incredibly nice to come back to To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is basically a love letter to Jerome K. Jerome, an idealised image of Victorian England, Victorian fiction, and Golden Age mystery novels. The author turns all of the above on its head and creates a delightful time travel romp. The stakes are high, too – it’s the whole space-time continuum, no less ;)

There is something to chuckle, laugh, or smile at on every page.

“ ’What on earth were you doing in the water?’
‘Drowning’, said professor Peddick.”

I loved the effects of time-lag (it happens when you do too much time travelling), which include attacks of maudlin sentimentality. Then you say show more stuff like “It’s no wonder they call you man’s best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice in our triumphs…” ets etc. Lovely.

There are lots of misunderstandings and people talking at each other rather than to each other, because their brains went on a holiday. Really, I wouldn’t trust any of these characters with ordering a coffee for me, let alone time travel. But it also means that you are wonderfully entertained all the way through.

Things come together very satisfyingly by the end. Don’t look too closely, though, because time travel books rarely make sense. Just go with the flow, dear reader. Enjoy the flow of the Thames... :))) show less

I re-read 'To Say Nothing Of The Dog' after a twenty-five-year gap that had left me with little memory of the book beyond that it was good and it made laugh. Reading it again, I can say that it remains good and it made me laugh several times. I'd also forgotten most of the things that made the book worth reading.

What is it about? Well, that depends. The plot seems to be about a time-lagged time traveller from Oxford in the 2030s wandering along the Thames in a boat in 1888 intent on fixing an 'incongruity' that could collapse the timeline that he comes from, perhaps resulting in Germany winning World War II. The same time traveller is also returning a missing cat, falling in love at first sight with a female colleague and trying to find show more the Bishop's Bird Stump, lost during the bombing of Coventry Cathedral in 1941, so that it can be included in the reconstructed Coventry Cathedral that is about to be opened in Oxford in the 2030s.

Sound confusing? Well, I think it's supposed to because it seems to me that none of these things is what the novel is about. I think 'To Say Nothing Of The Dog' a complex puzzle meant to amuse but also to demonstrate that, although we know it is futile to try and explain the operation of massively complex chaotic systems in terms of linear cause and effect, we just can't help ourselves. We have a deep need to simplify complexity in order to have a reason for why things happened and to preserve our own sense of urgency.

Connie Willis does a masterful job of playfully using the conventions of Golden Age detective fiction by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers to show the fallacy of reasoning our way to an answer in a system where everything is connected to and affected by everything else.

Connie Willis also shows us that, although people as people don't change over time, our reference points and expectations are so different from generation to generation that we can seem absurd to one another. The world of Jerome K Jerome's 'Three Men In A Boat', written from an unthinking security that only men born the ruling class of the world's most powerful empire, looks very different when you look back from the twenty-first century and wonder how they could have so child-like, so romantic in their conception of women, and so unassailably self-confident when, in less than thirty years, their entire world will have been blown apart.

By now, you may be wondering what it was that I was laughing at. Well, the book has a very specific kind of humour. The action and some of the actors are inherently silly. Some of the humour borrows from farce, some from rom-com and some is the raise-a-rueful-eyebrow and smile kind of humour that depends on the reader understanding all the connections that are there to be seen but which one wouldn't want to have to underline too heavily.

It took me the first quarter of the book before I relaxed (gave up?) and embraced the silliness of the book. Scenes like the first entrance into Muchings Hall or the allegedly Russian medium, Madame Iritovsky's seance made me laugh out loud.

I enjoyed watching the befuddlement of Ned Henry, one of the time travellers, at aspects of Victorian life, a period for which he has not been prepped. I was amused at his disappointment that an English Breakfast doesn't include bacon, eggs or toast unless you were a member of the proletariat and his astonishment that the Victorian idea of restoring a church was to whip out the 12th Century Font and the medieval windows and replace them with nice new ones.

I liked how mystified Ned was by cats. I'm like that all the time. Ned attributes his confusion to coming from an age when cats are extinct. I attribute my confusion to the cats. They like me to be confused so they can be superior.

The story is peppered with fascinating little snippets of history. The kind of anecdotes that appeal to my sense of the memorable and make me want to say, 'So that's why Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo' except, it eventually became clear to me that these are all there to show me how easy it is to attribute causality to something because it's simple and easy to understand but that history doesn't really work that way.

This is a novel where almost nothing is only just one thing. It's filled with so many I'm overlays of references that I sometimes felt a little time-lagged myself: watching Tossie cheating at croquet and seeing her as the Red Queen in Alice: the references to Wimsey's proposal to Vane (a scene I loved - in part because the proposal and acceptance were in Latin) and the feeling that Jeeves has just arrived in 1888 were all rather dislocating (as I'm sure they were meant to be).

My main difficulty with the book was the pace. It was so unhurried that, if the novel had been a person, I'd have been checking for a pulse. 'To Say Nothing Of The Dog' feels like a fun four-hundred-page novel that was unfortunately, five-hundred-and-twelve pages long.

Still, it is an extraordinary, one of a kind, sort of book that I'm glad I re-read. show less

First sentence: There were five of us--Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger. It was late afternoon on November the fifteenth, and we were in what was left of Coventry Cathedral, looking for the bishop's bird stump. Or at any rate I was.

Premise/plot: Ned Henry narrates the novel. And he does a great job. When we first meet him, he's suffering from time-lag. He's spent too much time--of late--jumping through time. He's not alone. There is someone doing her very, very best to drive EVERYONE in his department crazy. Lady Schrapnell is a woman on a mission--a RICH woman on a mission. And she won't take no for an answer. If Lady Schrapnell volunteers you for a job, well, you stay volunteered until the job show more is done to her satisfaction. And what does Lady Schrapnell want most of all? The bishop's bird stump. Her project is the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral--a cathedral destroyed/damaged during World War II. And she HAS to know if the bishop's bird stump was still in the church during the raid. She needs to know if it should be replicated as part of the 'restoration.' So Ned Henry is just one of dozens looking IN THE PAST for the answers as to what happened to the bishop's bird stump.

But that 'mission' becomes almost secondary....when it is 'discovered' that there's been an incongruity. At first they think it's simple, it's easily fixed. One of the time travelers interfered when she shouldn't. But. They'll just send another time traveler to fix that interference, and things should go smoothly. But since the time traveler they send is Ned Henry, since he's suffering from exhaustion and time-lag, since he barely heard his instructions, since he jumped into the Net to avoid being discovered by an angry Lady Schrapnell, nothing is simple. What Ned Henry soon realizes is that his arrival in June 1888 has changed things. His arrival has kept two people from meeting (and subsequently falling in love and marrying), and that's just the start.

But he isn't the only one in the past. He isn't the only time-traveler working to restore things. Verity Kindle. The beautiful Verity Kindle has a role to play as well....

Verity Kindle is the heroine of To Say Nothing of the Dog. She is on a mission of her own. While Ned Henry was given the assignment of finding out the whereabouts of the bishop's bird stump, Verity's assignment is to read Tocelyn's diary. The diary is available to read in the future. But the most relevant pages to the Coventry Cathedral project were damaged. So she's been sent to the oh-so-important summer of 1888 to read the newly written diary entries. She's having about as much success as Ned Henry. In other words, not much luck at all! These two work together as best they can. Verity manages to travel back and forth a few times to the future. Their mission--as they see it has changed a bit. They worry that they've damaged the future and that something horrible may happen as a result. Like Tocelyn, they know, was supposed to marry a "Mr. C". They know this for a fact from future diary entries. Yet here they are and she's engaged to someone else! Their "new mission" is to find the identity of "Mr. C." and make sure they meet when they're supposed to meet....

My thoughts: Read this book. That's all I have to say about that. No, not really. I have plenty to say about this one. But I don't think my review will be able to do this one justice. What is To Say Nothing of the Dog? It's a funny sci-fi mystery with a smidgen of romance.

I have a weakness for time travel. I do. And this one is a great example of a time-traveling sci-fi novel that just works really well. It's smart. It's funny.

I loved this one. I have always loved this one. It is a delightful time travel novel. I love the humor! I do! It's so very, very funny! And I love the details and the dialogue. This one is just a joy cover to cover!

Quotes:

2 Quotes About the bishop's bird stump:

"Perhaps it was removed for safekeeping," he said, looking at the windows. "Like the east windows."
"The bishop's bird stump?" I said incredulously. "Are you joking?"
"You're right," he said. "It isn't the sort of thing you'd want to keep from being blown up. Victorian art!" He shuddered. (7)

I must be getting light-headed from lack of sleep. No one, even badly shell-shocked, would steal it. Or buy it at a jumble sale. This was the bishop's bird stump. Even the munitions scrap iron drive would turn it down. Unless of course someone recognized its potential as a psychological weapon against the Nazis. (12)

About time-lag:

One of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober. (9)

And isn't this the truth:

There is nothing more helpful than shouted instructions, particularly incomprehensible ones. (153)

Verity Kindle on mystery novels:

"Of course they're usually about murder, not robbery, but they always take place in a country house like this, and the butler did it, at least for the first hundred mystery novels or so. Everyone's a suspect, and it's always the least likely person, and after the first hundred or so, the butler wasn't anymore--the least likely person, I mean--so they had to switch to unlikely criminals. You know, the harmless old lady or the vicar's devoted wife, that sort of thing, but it didn't take the reader long to catch on to that, and they had to resort to having the detective be the murderer, and the narrator, even though that had already been done in The Moonstone. The hero did it, only he didn't know it. He was sleepwalking, in his nightshirt, which was rather racy stuff for Victorian times, and the crime was always unbelievably complicated. In mystery novels. I mean, nobody ever ever just grabs the vase and runs, or shoots somebody in a fit of temper, and at the very end, when you think you've got it all figured out, there's one last plot-twist, and the crime's always very carefully thought out, with disguises and alibis and railway timetables and they have to include a diagram of the house in the frontispiece, showing everyone's bedroom and the library, which is where the body always is, and all the connecting doors, and even then you don't have a prayer of figuring it out, which is why they have to bring in a world-famous detective--"
"Who solves it with little gray cells?" I said.
"Yes. Hercule Poirot, that's Agatha Christie's detective, and he says it isn't at all necessary to go running about measuring footprints and picking up cigarette ends to solve mysteries like Sherlock Holmes. That's Arthur Conan Doyle's detective--"
"I know who Sherlock Holmes is." (205)

Well, it wasn't exactly the ending of an Agatha Christie mystery, with Hercule Poirot gathering everyone together in the drawing room to reveal the murderer and impress everyone with his astonishing deductive powers. And it definitely wasn't a Dorothy Sayers, with the detective hero saying to his heroine sidekick, "I say, we make a jolly good detectin' team. How about makin' the partnership permanent, eh, what?" and then proposing in Latin. (431)

Verity and Ned:

She peered at me. "It isn't fair, you know."
"What isn't?" I said warily.
"Your boater. It makes you look just like Lord Peter Wimsey, especially when you tilt it forward like that." (254)

"The first time I ever saw you, I thought, he looks just like Lord Peter Wimsey. You were wearing the boater and--no, that wasn't the first time," she said accusingly. "The first time was in Mr. Dunworthy's office, and you were all covered in soot. You were still adorable, though, even if your mouth was hanging open." (254)

"Lord Peter took a nap," she said. "Harriet watched him sleep, and that's when she knew she was in love with him."
She sat up again. "Of course, I knew it from the second page of Strong Poison, but it took two more books for Harriet to figure it out. She kept telling herself it was all just detecting and deciphering codes and solving mysteries together, but I knew she was in love with him. He proposed in Latin. Under a bridge. After they solved the mystery. You can't propose till after you've solved the mystery. That's a law in detective novels."
She sighed. "It's too bad. 'Placetne, magistra?' he said when he proposed, and then she said, 'Placet.' That's a fancy Oxford don way of saying yes. I had to look it up. I hate it when people use Latin and don't tell you what they mean..." (259) show less

i have to admit that i would have never picked this book up based on the jacket description and cover image alone. but, this was the March selection for Calico Reaction, which hasn’t disappointed me yet, so i figured i’d give it a shot. and, wow, am i glad i did?!?Ned Henry is an historian from the future who is time travelling all over creation in search of a hideous piece of artwork called the bishop’s bird stump, that the Lady Schrapnell insists on having in her re-creation of the Coventry Church of England. but, he has come down with timelag from the excessive number of ‘drops’ and is sent back in time to Victorian England to rest, and to stay out of sight from the very demanding Lady Schrapnell. however, he is also given show more the simple task of… he can’t remember, but it has something to do with a cat and a marriage.with that, the opening scenes shove us directly into the hilarious disorientation of Ned Henry, who, as our narrator, has “trouble distinguishing sounds, preoccupation with irrelevancies, and tendency towards sentimentality” and clearly shouldn’t be doing anything other than sleeping. “[Lady Schrapnell:] wanted me to go back to the Blitz and look for the bishop’s bathtub.” “Bird stump,” I corrected. “That’s what I said,” he said, looking hard at me. “You’re having difficultly distinguishing sounds, aren’t you? The nurse said you were. And you’re obviously disoriented.” He shook his head. “You’re not going to be any use at all.”once in Victorian times, he meets a lovestruck Terence and the object of his attentions, a lace and frills lady named Tossie, and a whole slew of equally hilarious supporting characters. most importantly, Ned finds fellow historian Verity Kindle, who is acting as Tossie’s cousin to get Tossie married to an unknown Mr. C and gather information from her diary. from there, the mystery and romance begin to expose themselves ever so slowly.the most entertaining parts of the book, for me, were the fumblings of Ned to fit into whatever time he’d found himself. generally, when time travelling, the historian would be briefed, but given his timelag, he couldn’t remember much and had to make due with whatever historical information he could manage from memory. this ranged from him making things up to getting it all wrong, but always managed to be laugh out loud goodness. “I wasn’t prepped at all,” I said. “Two hours of subliminals, real-time, which I was too time-lagged to hear. On the subservient status of women, mostly. And fish forks.” She looked appalled. “You weren’t prepped? Victorian society’s highly mannered. Breaches of etiquette are taken very seriously.” She looked curiously at me. “How have you managed thus far?” “For the past two days I’ve been on the river with an Oxford don who quotes Herodotus, a lovesick young man who quotes Tennyson, a bulldog, and a cat,” I said. “I played it by ear.”this comedy of errors is extremely well written and has so many historical and literary references that it’ll make your head spin. and on top of that, the complexities of time travel definitely take some getting used to, with incongruities and slippage. it can be a little excessive, but it is a necessary part of the plot, so i can’t really fault it either. the dialogue is side splitting and the characters are so absurd that you can’t help but love them and although the plot is complex, it comes together very nicely in the end. i definitely recommend this book to anyone with even a hint of interest. it’s well worth the read.one side note – i do think that this would have been even more enjoyable for me if i’d known more about Victorian history and literature, but it was still highly enjoyable without. i’m actually tempted to pick up Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat now just because of this. show less

My goodness this one was hilarious. Ned travels to the Victorian era from the future to help solve the problem of restoring Conventry Cathedral. Soon he finds himself boating down the Thames, navigating Victorian etiquette and trying to save a kitten. The supporting characters like his partner in crime Verity, Baine the butler, flighty Tossie, and the abominable Lady Schrapnell are what really make the book. I just loved it and I'm glad I read Three Men in a Boat first to get all the added references.

“History was indeed controlled by blind forces, as well as character and courage and treachery and love. And accident and random chance. And stray bullets and telegrams and tips. And cats.”

“The reason Victorian society was so show more restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.”

“People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.” show less

1st Review: The problem with laughing when reading this book is that you have to put it down until you have stopped laughing. And no one, in their right mind, would want to do that. Willis is one of the best authors I have ever read! Clever, funny, and marvelously brave, she dives headfirst into complex ideas and makes it work!

2nd Review: March is the month of rereads. And this was a delight. This time around, having polished my detective skills with extensive Agatha Christie reading (See my 2018 reading list), I caught much more of the details that Willis sprinkles generously but not obstructively in the novel that make the puzzle all fit together. Truly a masterful composition by Willis. Worth the read. And the reread. And the next show more reread. show less