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mburnamfink 's review for:
To Say Nothing of the Dog
by Connie Willis
With To Say Nothing of the Dog Connie Willis significantly improves on Domesdays Book by writing a tolerable and even gripping parody of Victorian comedy-of-manners, as well as engaging with some paradoxes of time travel.
Ned Henry is a time travelling historian with a major problem named Lady Shrapnell, a wealthy eccentric who is trying to reconstruct the destroyed Coventry Cathedral in honor of her great-great grandmother. He's been sent back to Coventry in 1940 in search of some monstrous piece of art called the Bishop's Birdstump so many times that he's totally and completely time-lagged, which comes with symptoms like Difficulty Hearing and Excessive Sentimentality and Speaking in Rhyming Couplets. He's sent back on an easy mission to 1888, just drop off a something with someone somewhere (difficulty hearing, again), and relax for two weeks until the time lag clears.
Of course, nothing goes easy. Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler has brought a cat forward in time. The whole space-time continuum may be on the very of unraveling, and Ned has to set it right before he's grandfather paradoxed himself (and possibly the entire universe) out of existence. Meanwhile, he has to entertain a love-besotted Oxford student, an absent-minded professor, adorably pushy animals, an airheaded debutante, and a Spiritualism obsessed matron. The plot careens through various comedic situations before resolving in a spectacular flurry of precisely plotted time-travel.
This book is a lot more fun and convincing than Domesday Book, probably because Willis is able to draw so heavily from Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, Agatha Christie, Jane Austen, P. G. Wodehouse, and a host of English comedic writers. The exact extent of the derivation is left to readers more familiar with the genre. She also engages with the time travel aspect of the plot, with time lag as a humorous complication, a debate about what matters in making history-individuals or grand forces, and a reasonably coherent explanation for the durability of the space-time continuum based around the anthropic principle and the forcing of co-incidence in a complex system where everything is connected.
However, the time travel is about as deep as Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, without some of the truly weird stuff that happens when you can run timelines non-linearly. The book takes about 150 pages to get going, and spends far too much time cooing over dumb animals. And on a personal note, To Say Nothing of the Dog beat Bruce Sterling's Distraction for the Hugo in 1999, which makes me want to time travel back to WorldCon and Kanye-Swift the ceremony.
Ned Henry is a time travelling historian with a major problem named Lady Shrapnell, a wealthy eccentric who is trying to reconstruct the destroyed Coventry Cathedral in honor of her great-great grandmother. He's been sent back to Coventry in 1940 in search of some monstrous piece of art called the Bishop's Birdstump so many times that he's totally and completely time-lagged, which comes with symptoms like Difficulty Hearing and Excessive Sentimentality and Speaking in Rhyming Couplets. He's sent back on an easy mission to 1888, just drop off a something with someone somewhere (difficulty hearing, again), and relax for two weeks until the time lag clears.
Of course, nothing goes easy. Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler has brought a cat forward in time. The whole space-time continuum may be on the very of unraveling, and Ned has to set it right before he's grandfather paradoxed himself (and possibly the entire universe) out of existence. Meanwhile, he has to entertain a love-besotted Oxford student, an absent-minded professor, adorably pushy animals, an airheaded debutante, and a Spiritualism obsessed matron. The plot careens through various comedic situations before resolving in a spectacular flurry of precisely plotted time-travel.
This book is a lot more fun and convincing than Domesday Book, probably because Willis is able to draw so heavily from Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, Agatha Christie, Jane Austen, P. G. Wodehouse, and a host of English comedic writers. The exact extent of the derivation is left to readers more familiar with the genre. She also engages with the time travel aspect of the plot, with time lag as a humorous complication, a debate about what matters in making history-individuals or grand forces, and a reasonably coherent explanation for the durability of the space-time continuum based around the anthropic principle and the forcing of co-incidence in a complex system where everything is connected.
However, the time travel is about as deep as Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, without some of the truly weird stuff that happens when you can run timelines non-linearly. The book takes about 150 pages to get going, and spends far too much time cooing over dumb animals. And on a personal note, To Say Nothing of the Dog beat Bruce Sterling's Distraction for the Hugo in 1999, which makes me want to time travel back to WorldCon and Kanye-Swift the ceremony.