Review: To Say Nothing of the Dog

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought I had read this, but as they say, if it isn't in Goodreads it didn't happen.

This is a difficult book to categorise/describe. In the future time travel is a real thing, but since nothing can be brought back from the past it has fallen out of favour (can't plunder history you see). Accordingly, funding for time travel experimentation is left to wealthy eccentrics like Lady Schrapnell who is determined to rebuild Coventry Cathedral because her distant relative once visited the Cathedral in the 1880s, before it was destroyed by fire in a bombing raid during WW2, and according to her diary the visit changed her life, particularly an artefact called the Bishop's bird stump.

Our hero, Ned Henry, has been sent back to the cathedral, along with several others, on multiple occasions to try to determine what happened to the bird stump, so much so that he is suffering from an advanced case of time lag which requires two weeks rest. Unfortunately lady Schrapnell is like a bulldozer and rides roughshod over everyone else so he is unlikely to get the rest he needs, especially since the ceremony to open the new cathedral is just weeks away.

It turns out that a fellow time traveller has returned from the 1880s an accidentally brought something back with her - something previously thought to be impossible and the institute posits that this is causing time slippage on multiple other drops to the past. Ned is charged with returning the object to the 1880s before its presence in the future causes further instability, once safely returned Ned can enjoy two weeks rest safe from Lady Schrapnell. However, symptoms of time lag include Difficulty in Distinguishing Sounds as well as a tendency to drift off into daydreams. Consequently, Ned is sent to the 1880s ill-prepared and not entirely what he is supposed to return. From the outset things go wrong, Ned accidentally prevents a young man meeting his future wife, something that could have devastating consequences in the future as one of their descendants would have been a bomber pilot in WW2.

What follows is (I believe) a homage to Three Men in a Boat, it also draws heavily on the country house farce and the country house mystery with frequent allusions to the detective styles of Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey. There's boating, mad professors, stately butlers, silly girls, a jumble sale, a séance, and lots more madcap fun. Its certainly very different to the first book which has stayed with me for decades.

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