Book Review: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

To Say Nothing of the Dog, or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis is the second of her Oxford Time Travel series and came recommended to me from a friend. I was originally going to skip over it, since I had heard such good things about Blackout/All Clear and had enjoyed Doomsday Book, but was encouraged to give this one a try first. And I'm glad I did. It was surprisingly fun and enjoyable up to the last page! This was also my first time getting a book from the library here, which was also a good experience.

Read on for my spoiler-free review.

Overall Impression

This book was both hilarious and engaging. I liked the characters and the sense of humor as they tried to solve the very problems they were causing. The plot moved along quite well and while a Victorian setting was not my go-to, by the end of the book I too yearned to take a quiet river ride in a more tranquil age. Though, I wouldn't want to stay too long there!

Plot

I'm not sure quite what I expected from this book. I was told it was a nice palate cleanser after Doomsday Book. It ended up being quite a ride. In some aspects, it is indeed a palate cleanser with hilarious encounters and miscommunications, yet in others it is a tense journey through space and time as things start to break down. It certainly keeps you engaged all the way through, whether it's from romantic drama or epic universe-shattering chaos. It was so hard to keep myself from reading yet another chapter each time I ended one.

Characters

We follow the story through the eyes of Ned Henry, a historian frequently sent back to the 1940s, yet now sent to get some rest in the Victorian times of 1888. The time lag he suffers after so many time jumps from makes for some hilarious misconceptions. In a similar vein we have Verity Kindle, a young woman well versed in the Victorian era who teams up with Ned to try to figure out what to do about Tossie Mering and the unfortunate circumstances surrounding her missing cat, an unexpected suitor, and a missed encounter, to say nothing of the dog. Of the secondary characters, Baine, the butler, is probably my favorite as he strives to serve the family with their ever unreasonable demands.

Setting / World Building

This is a time travel novel set in the same universe as Doomsday Book. It's set in 2057, though since written quite a while ago the future looks a bit different than I would have expected. We get to see a little bit more of how time travel is handled, particularly since this book heavily focuses on an incongruity- a series of events that should not be possible when something from the past gets brought to the present. This causes all sorts of problems as events in the past stop happening when/how they should, and we get some lengthy discussions of how the space time continuum has measures to prevent this from happening.

Most of the novel, however, we spend in 1888 in a small town a short river journey away from Oxford. While I'm not too familiar with the Victorian era, it was still cool to see how people lived in that time. At times it seemed idyllic, but more often than not oppressive and exhaustive. It was an interesting contrast and made for some funny circumstances.

Final Thoughts

This was an excellent book. I had some initial hesitation, since I tend to favor more epic stories and this one was described to me as a more comedic story. However, I ended up enjoying it immensely. It is indeed a playful story with a bit of detective work, some romance, some action, and a lot of crazy characters. I'll be remembering the antics for quite some time and look forward to wrapping up the time travel series with Blackout/All Clear sometime soon.