To Say Nothing of the Dog
by Connie Willis
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Book Reviews of To Say Nothing of the Dog
Book Review: "in media res"
Summary: 5 Stars
We are always in the middle of things and things are always in the midst of what we do. Thomas Carlyle writing in 1829 in The Signs of the Times argued, "It is no very good symptom either of nations or individuals that they deal much in vaticination. Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them; and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand." I suspect that Connie Willis subscribes to that view. In "To Say Nothing of the Dog" her premise is how our efforts to shape the future are unlikely to succeed even when we believe that that future is known to us. For Willis advances the proposition that the future is already written and, to quote Edward Fitzgerald writing in 1859, "nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it". This book is extremely well plotted, its style is a pastiche of the late Victorian and early Edwardian manner epitomised in Jerome K Jerome, H G Wells, Oscar Wilde and others (including an oblique nod to L. Frank Baum, I think) and its theme, while easily lending itself to profound and ponderous treatment, is handled with great humour and wit. Willis is clearly well read. She has, for example, absorbed the lessons of Shakespeare's comedies - to which she makes express reference - and takes the wranglings of the serious-minded as a foil to the romantic entanglements of young lovers. The devices of mistaken identities, over-earnest pedants and wise servants are honestly borrowed and delightfully employed.
If I were to criticise the book it would be because most of the characters do not develop much beyond our first encounter with them. For the protagonist there is an epiphany but it does not work in him the changes that, for example, the events at sea have in Hamlet in Act 5 scene 1. In dénouement there is a half-enunciated realisation that events which appeared to be acts of free will were elements of the "Grand Design" (the existence of which was grist for the mill of the pedants in the novel) much as Hamlet finally knows that "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will", but this being in classical terms a comedy and not a tragedy this realisation is not cathartic. It is followed instead by the appearance after 490 pages of the novel's equivalent of the Wizard of Oz, the sounds of a Cathedral organ and choir rising in English hymn and the journey's end in lovers' meeting.
It is an excellent and absorbing read. And if Carlyle with customary seriousness advised that, "Are the solemn temples in which the Divinity was once visibly revealed among us, crumbling away? Then we can repair them, we can rebuild them" then Shakespeare with customary humour responded (two hundred years earlier) that, "The cat will mew and dog will have his day". Read this book and you will know they were both correct.
John.
Book Review: To say nothing of the cat
Summary: 5 Stars
Connie Willis has made a career (or, at least, impressed the Hugo and Nebula award committees) of using Time Travel as a method to tell an intriguing human story. Having said that, and to Ms. Willis's credit, there are almost no other similarities between this book, "To Say Nothing of the Dog," and "The Doomsday Book." For my money, this book is superior - in pacing and sheer enjoyment - although both are well worth their cover prices.
In the year 2057 (time travel having been invented 30 years earlier), the Lady Schrapnell decides to use the technology to rebuild Coventry Cathedral. She wants it exactly as it appeared in 1940 just before being incinerated by the Nazis during the Blitz. Because of it is specifically mentioned in the diary of an anscestor, of particular interest is the "Bishop's Bird Stump." Unfortunately for Ned Henry, the historian assigned to determining the location of the Bird Stump in 1940, the item is missing. Was the Bird Stump stolen? Burned in the fire? Removed at the same time as the Cathedral's stained glass windows and subsequently misplaced? After numerous jumps back in time, and through a further series of misadventures, he ends up in Victorian England of 1888. Somehow the events that take place in Oxford in that year relate to the mystery of the missing Bishop's Bird Stump. He (and fellow historian Verity Kindle) must sort out the mystery and prevent any (further?) damage to the space-time continuum.
In true time-travel paradox fashion, Willis builds up a series of seeming crises and paradoxes and then sorts them all out in a convoluted but (I think) consistent conclusion. She invokes chaos theory to describe how events in 1888 could be so vital to solving a space-time incogruity in 1940. But the time-travel paradox is only one aspect of the book - it is also a farcical romp, a romantic comedy, and a commentary on the joys and sorrows of Victorian life. At times it is laugh-out-loud funny; most of the time is is amusing and always engaging. It also keeps you guessing, because you never know how the time-travel machine is going to work, based on the space-time continuum's efforts to correct the paradoxes being introduced by all the time travel.
If there is a criticism I can make of the book, it's that it's a little too self-referential. Apparently inspired by Jerome K. Jerome's book "Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog)", the characters refer to this work numerous times - quoting it and even meeting Jerome himself (in a boat, no less). Perhaps a more clever title would have been "To Say Nothing of the Cat" since the cat in the story plays a more significant role than the dog. But I guess that's nitpicking. Overall, it's a fun and enjoyable time-travel romp.
Book Review: Enjoyable But Tedious Read
Summary: 3 Stars
I picked this book up after a coworker recommended the time travel books Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis. When I read the Amazon reviews, I came across To Say Nothing of the Dog, and its reviews were consistently better. So I chose the safe way and picked it first.
When I buy a book in the bookstore, I always read a few pages, the first page, and a random one in the middle, to see if I am going to like the style. Many a good-looking book does not pass that test and I put it back on the shelf, unpurchased.
With the Kindle, while it is possible to download a sample, I tend to not to do that, and buy books outright. I need to stop that. Rule 1 when buying eBooks:
Read the sample chapters before buying.
As I read the first chapter I discovered that I didn't like Willis' dialog heavy and somewhat rich style. There was so much going on, so much dialog, right in the first few pages, that I was thoroughly confused, and I started just skimming forward with the expectation that I would not make it very far. Then things get clearer in the second chapter, so I continued, faithful reader that I am, and I lumbered forward into Chapter 4, 14% into the book. That's when I gave up.
If you like time travel, this is a great, colorful, sometimes funny and probably very fulfilling story. It's pure time travel, no doubt. But there were some things going on that seemed so dumb, so farfetched that I simply could not ignore them and I got yanked back from the world of the book into the world of the book critic. The book didn't capture me, it kept pushing me out and then yelling "Look at me!"
For instance, fairly early in the story the protagonist Ned Henry is sent back to June 7, 1988 to Victorian England, near Oxford. He prepares for the trip in a rush, being outfitted with the right period wardrobe, luggage and money so he could pass for a "contemp" when he got there. In the hurry of the preparations, however, he misses the details of his actual mission, and when he get there, he does not know where he is and what he is supposed to do. This is good for interesting plot development and conflict initiation, but it's just too incredible that an outfit designed for time travel with the technology and infrastructure to send countless agents into the past for many different missions, would not have a better process in place to brief its agents on the mission.
Ultimately, I am sure I could have finished reading the story with enjoyment, but with a reading list as large as mine and so little time, I decided to say bye to the writer Connie Willis right here.
Book Review: Most excellent
Summary: 5 Stars
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.)
Book Review: This the story, that made me laugh, that made milk shoot...
Summary: 4 Stars
...from my nose, that the cat drank off the floor, in the house that Jack built! Wow. What a fun novel! This 1999 Hugo award winning book was a sheer joy to read. Miss Willis certainly has done her research on Victorian England. I felt like I was there. The story takes place in the very near future (between 2000 and 2100) and is told in the first person by a time-traveling reconstructionist named Ned Henry. Ned's boss, Lady Shrapnell, is ruthless in her pursuit of knowledge about a particular item known as 'The Bishop's Bird Stump.' Lady Shrapnell is rebuilding Coventry Cathedral (which was destroyed during WWII in a German bombing raid), and will stop at nothing to recreate as much of the cathedral as she can. She has EVERYONE working on this project. Even some who shouldn't be. Or maybe, some who no longer should be.
Enter Ned Henry, our narrator for the novel, who is in serious need of some sleep. He has 'time-lag,' which is basically the worst jetlag you could imagine, but with some serious mental repercussions: it makes the time-traveler recite poetry and become loving of all things, as well as making the poor time-lagged individual have DDS (Difficulty Distinguishing Sounds) and a few other uproariously uncomfortable things. But Lady Shrapnell needs Ned to find this damn bird stump...so she won't let him rest.
Enter Verity, a beautiful time-traveler who happens to be in Victorian England in 1888 with Ned. Does Ned fall in love with her, and she with him, or are they both just severely time-lagged? If their mental capacities aren't completely up to par, how on earth are they going to find this bird stump? What do the people of Victorian England think of these two strangers who dress like them, but don't necessarily act like them?
With all its 'bolderdashes' and the like, this book pulls off some incredibly rousing comedy and I loved the ending. It wrapped everything up nicely but left you wondering 'Where do we go from here?'
The book has its faults, however; which is why I gave it four stars and not five. The first sixty pages of the novel dragged for me, but after that, it picked right up and kept me interested for the most part. There were also a few times when Ned does several 'jumps' into the past (rapid successive jumps) but doesn't get time-lagged...so that seemed a bit convenient.
Even so, a highly enjoyable read with lots of historical comedy and futuristic techno-babble; acceptable techno-babble. Not overly so.
Pick it up and read it. It's pretty light and pretty hilarious.