To Say Nothing of the Dog - Softcover

Willis, Connie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553575384 ISBN 13: 9780553575385

Publisher: Bantam, 1998

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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!

From the Publisher:

Praise for Connie Willis's Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Doomsday Book:

"A tour de force."
--The New York Times Book Review

"... stunning...the best work yet from one of science fiction's best writers."
--The Denver Post

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997:
"Displaying the skills that have won her more major SF awards than any other writer of the decade, Willis juggles comedy of manners, hard science theory and a host of literary references in this sophisticated dazzlement."
--Publishers Weekly

"An utter delight. Ms. Willis's unique, engaging voice will carry you off to a place where chaos theory makes perfect sense, time-travel is a reasonable mode of transport and safeguarding the fate of humanity is a respectable day job. Her wonderfully intelligent writing enchants and enthralls. Enjoy!"
Amanda Quick

"I have long thought that Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men and a Boat is one of the highest points of Inimitable British Humor. I chuckle; I gurgle; I know those three men, to say nothing of the dog. And now I am convinced that there was a woman concealed in that boat, too: Connie Willis."
--Laurie R. King

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0553575384
• ISBN 13: 9780553575385
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 512