To Say Nothing of the Dog

So, recently, in Adventures of Being a Gothy Cliché, I joined a SF/F meetup group specifically to attend their Halloween party. And then I didn't like any of the other stuff the meetup group was doing. Until I got a message saying that their book for their December book club was going to be Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, which has been on my TBR list for a while.

Things I knew about To Say Nothing of the Dog:

1. Its title is a reference to Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog), a book I have not read, but which is supposed to be very funny, and is a travel narrative about... well, exactly what it says on the tin: three men in a boat.

2. Somehow it's a SF/F book despite being based on a Victorian travel narrative. (I thought it was going to be maybe about three men and a dog on a space boat? So unprepared.)

3. ???????

It turns out, To Say Nothing of the Dog is about TIME TRAVEL, which I would have known if I had read the subtitle of the book, which is "(Oxford Time Travel #2)". I have not read whatever Oxford Time Travel #1 is, but whatever. It is also about THE VICTORIAN ERA, which is one of my favorite eras. Overall, it is a sci-fi, historical fiction, mystery, comic novel, with a side of romance. So, all the things.

The driving force of the plot of the novel is a formidable and very wealthy American heiress who married into the British peerage and is now known as Lady Schrapnell. Lady Schrapnell is basically funding the entire time travel research department at Oxford in exchange for their help in rebuilding Coventry Cathedral, which was bombed by the Nazis in World War II. Our protagonist, Ned Henry, is an Historian, whose talents are currently being wasted by being sent by Lady Schrapnell to dozens and dozens of local jumble sales throughout history, mostly in the 1940s, trying to observe and take notes on every detail of the Cathedral. One of the items that isn't quite accounted for is an overdecorated Victorian monstrosity known as "the bishop's bird stump"--we don't find out what precisely that is until at least halfway through the book--which had been life-changingly important to one of Lady Schrapnell's ancestors. The other main driver of the plot is that another Historian, Verity Kindle, accidentally brought a cat through the time-travel net from 1888. Ned comes down with an advanced case of time-lag and is sentenced to two weeks' rest, which Lady Schrapnell will no way let him get, so the Oxford people send Ned back to 1888 with the cat and tell him to rest in the Victorian countryside. This isn't really how Ned's trip to 1888 ends up going; instead, he ends up on a boat with a rambly Oxford undergraduate named Terence, an even more rambly Oxford don named Professor Peddick, and a bulldog named Cyril. Shenanigans ensue, as do incongruities in the space-time continuum, due to the cat. Then there is a lot of stuff about chaos theory and missed trains and penwipers and women's education and kippers, and a hundred thousand bajilliondy references to literature and history. My favorite bits were when the Historians made Jack the Ripper references and then tried to remember if Jack the Ripper had been active in 1888, because I just read about that in The Invention of Murder, so I knew that he was active in 1888, but in the fall and winter, whereas this novel takes place in June, so not yet. Then I felt smarter than Oxford Historians! I don't usually feel quite that smart, so it was nice.

Anyway. Ned is a pretty likeable protagonist; he seems to be a pretty competent person generally but he is rather adorably unprepared for the Victorian era, plus he spends half the book with time-lag, which is a pretty funny affliction, at least from the readers' perspective. (Symptoms include random outbreaks of maudlin poeticalness, Difficulty Distinguishing Sounds, hormone imbalances, and a noise like an air raid siren going off in one's head.) Ned is also apparently adorable when wearing a boater hat, especially at a jaunty angle. He is very dedicated to doing his job properly and not fucking up the space-time continuum, even when his job devolves into going to lots of mid-twentieth-century jumble sales and buying penwipers, although in that case, he might be committed to doing it properly, but he doesn't have to like it. Ned's inner narration makes cursory attempts at seeing where people are coming from, but largely it is just hilariously judgmental.

Verity is also a great character. When she first shows up Ned starts poetically comparing her to a naiad and all that sort of Love At First Sight Due Entirely To Physical Beauty stuff, but this is because he is time-lagged, and therefore both maudlinly poetical and hormonally imbalanced. He specifically compares her to a naiad because she is all wet after jumping into the Thames to save the cat. Verity has actually been prepped for the Victorian era, so she saves Ned's bacon on propriety things on a number of occasions; she is also presented as a perfectly competent and intelligent Historian who is just a bit out of her depth in the overwhelming amount of wacky that is this book's plot. I also like that her characterization isn't static; she is usually pretty poised and polite, as she would have to be to pass as a respectable young Victorian woman, but going on "drops" (i.e. time-traveling) makes her sort of talkative and giddy and then she eats all of Ned's food. I cannot remember the last time I read a book where a female character was allowed to babble and eat other people's food and was still treated seriously. Verity has also spent a lot of time in the 1930s, which she claims was fantastically boring, as there was nothing to do except read mystery novels, so she brings a lot of fun mystery genre-savvy to the book. Just because it bears repeating: Verity gets to talk a lot about goofy shit like mystery novels, but she is still treated as a serious, intelligent, and competent character. I would like more characters like Verity, please.

I would happily ramble about To Say Nothing of the Dog all day, but I'm not sure how much sense it would make to anyone reading this who hasn't read the book already, because it's a very strange and complicated novel. It clocks in at nearly five hundred pages, which is extremely long for a comic novel, because it has to cram in as many jokes about cats and chaos theory and kippers as humanly possible. Every page of it is extremely well-researched and deliriously silly. I strongly recommend it to anyone who likes time travel narratives, chaos theory, nineteenth century nonsense, historical tidbits, saucy fictional cats, lowbrow but highly educated humor (think Monty Python), and British stuff. In fact, I would strongly advise against reading it unless you are moderately familiar with British literature and history, or you may spend the whole book looking stuff up on Wikipedia.

Review originally posted at http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.com/36883.html