To Say Nothing of the Dog

A comedic romp as a time traveler from the not so distant future bumbles his way through the English aristocracy of the late 1880s.

Ned Henry is a time traveler whose job is to go back in time to search for collectible items from jumble sales for his boss Lady Schrapnell. This time he's sent back to find a hideous piece of ironware called The Bishop's Bird Stump that went missing from Coventry Cathedral in the bombing. Along the way he manages to divert the course of history of one of Lady Schrapnell's ancestors and frantically tries to fix his error before it derails the whole of the twentieth century history.

There's Ned and his secret accomplice, accompanied by a rich and lovesick university student, an Oxford don obsessed with history and fish, a wealthy landowner in a stately home, a bunch of aristocratic young women intent on marrying, lots of household servants, train timetables, parish fetes, jumble sales, a once drowned cat, and a dog.

It's a bit Monty Python / Hitchhiker's Guide as Ned bounces from one mistake to another, but as the story progresses we get the impression that there is something vitally important underlying his assignment. And slowly the discussions between the Oxford don and the landowner on the importance of minor events in history's major battles start to take on a new significance.

The author is very playful with the information she withholds from both her characters and from her readers, which creates a fun dynamic between reader and character. I loved that the story was light and full of absurdity.

I found it especially silly that the book is essentially about a time-travelling cat causing chaos, yet it is named with a reference to Cyril instead, who doesn't drive any of the plot, making the title extremely apt. I hated Tossie, even her name is distasteful to me, and her mother was an even more detestable figure. I did manage to guess Tossie's ending about 2/3 of the way through after more than one mention of the Butler Did It trope.

Overall I found this to be clever, well written, and lighthearted. My only qualm was that maybe the pacing was a bit too slow for the content.

One of my favorite books ever. Time travel, mystery, romance, and cats right at the center of the plot. I can't recommend this one enough.

Summary: Time Traveling “historians” are sent back to block a couple falling in love because it will distort all of history. 

This is the second of Connie Willis' books that I have read. The first in this series, Doomsday Book, is also centered on time travel, but it is a very different book. Doomsday Book is about going to a medieval community near Oxford, and it deals with the programs of a global pandemic (the Black Death) and the problems of observing evil that you cannot change.

In that first book, time travel was relatively new, and the thinking was that it was impossible to change history. However, history may have changed in the second book, and they are trying to figure out how to put it back again. And that involved going to Victorian England, playing matchmaker, and blocking a romance.

Connie Willis has a lot of humor in her writing. It is a good change of pace. But I think, like Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog is a bit long. I think the various threads and the false turns she brings the reader on as a means to get to the end are fun. But it could be cut a bit.

The book opens with a narration that doesn't make sense. As you get into the book a little bit, you discover that the narrator has a “Time Lag.” Time Lag is a condition brought about by too many time travel jumps too quickly together, causing the person to be confused, have a problem hearing, be sentimental, and fall in love (and declare it.)

One of the fun aspects of the book is that it looks at a different era through the eyes of the potential future. To Say Nothing of the Dog was written in 1997 and set in 2057, 2018, 1940, and 1888. As I said in my review of the Doomsday Book, the projections of what may be are always interesting, even if the author made projections only 25 years ago.

According to reviews, the 3rd and 4th books of this series, Blackout and All Clear, are a single book split into two parts, and together they are about 1200 pages. So I am not sure I will get to them soon.

Lighthearted and made me laugh out loud a couple of times.

I just happened to start on this book immediately after my first time reading Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers.

Coincidence, or incongruity?

What a great book though, to say nothing of the butler.

I did not expect much from this book. A Victorian comedy of manners? Not my usual fare. But it promised time travel, so I had to check it out, and I was richly rewarded in more ways than I expected. This book is so many things, but above all, extremely funny. A welcome change after all the dark apocalyptic dystopias I read in recent years. I want more.

This series seems to cross several genre categories. You'll probably like it more than I do, if you like Romance, Mystery, Steampunk, and time travel paradox. Your enjoyment of the book will also be enhanced if you can tolerate multiple concurrent confusing dialogues. It will help if you aren't bothered by a lot of archaic words, some of which aren't even in the dictionary. Perhaps I would have understood more of the references if I was a fanatic anglophile with an interest in England's history from a hundred years ago.

I don't want my review to be entirely negative, so while I don't think that the rules for time travel are consistent in this series, it was still a readable story - even if it was a bit sappy.

Excellent comedic story of accidentally ending the world to time travel, and the only way to prevent it is to run around the Victorian era trying to arrange a marriage. The romances are fleshed out and the characters feel real

This is my first Connie Willis book and I loved it! Time travel, the Victorian era in England and a mystery that kept me intrigued from beginning to end. There were laugh out loud moments, characters I cared for, a bit of romance and a story that had a nice balance between the characters and the adventure. I highly recommend it!

I love this book so much.

Completely brilliant, hard to put down.

Just once, I'd like a character in a Connie Willis book to go back in time and not spend all their time worrying about altering the past

This is a very amusing book, especially for those who have read Three Men in A Boat. I think Jerome leaves Willis in the dust for outright belly laughs, but this book did have me smiling a lot.

Neargh. I couldn't wait for this to end.

I discovered Connie Willis long ago, via her Hugo/Nebula winner, Doomsday Book, which is a great read. It's rich in detail, with a good balance of humor and pathos, and a tantalizing glimpse both into the deep past (14th century, Black Plague-ravaged Oxford) and into the near future (21st century, slightly high-tech Oxford). Unfortunately, Willis did have a tendency towards flat characterizations and one-note plotting - something which you don't really notice in Doomsday, since the parallel of plague-ridden Oxfords was compelling enough. But you really, really notice it in this. (And it makes me worried about All Clear, despite the Hugo/Nebula wins, since I've seen these same criticisms leveled at her before.)

From the same Oxfordiverse, here we follow a different batch of time-traveling historians, this time a group scrambling to reconstruct the WW2-destroyed Coventry Cathedral. The protagonist, Ned Henry, gets sent to Victorian era Oxford to (1) recover from his pretty severe case of time-lag (kind of like existential jet lag), and (2) do the usual Time Travel Plot Device - that is, address an “incongruity” in the fabric of time-space before the entire universe collapses or multiple timelines develop and the Nazis end up winning.

The book is an examination of that darling of 1990s pop science: chaos theory. Cue Dr. Malcolm. It's also a bit about historiography, and free will vs. Fate. And that's all fine and well and interesting. But Willis, unfortunately, ruins everyyyything by turning it into a madcap, Victorian farce that is, oh my Lord, not funny at all. Ever. I can get what she's going for: that old fashioned comedy of manners stuff where doors open and close a lot, there are lots of missed calls and close calls, and everything could probably be resolved if just one character explained The Problem to everyone in about ten minutes. That stuff can sometimes be funny, if the dialogue's good enough - though it does try my patience even then.

But in this book! Oh dear. Every character is a flat caricature who engages in broad comedy, mostly relating to either One Principal Behavior (e.g. American is bossy, loud, and American! Oxford don is eccentric and spouts Latin!) or a semi-offensive “funny” accent (e.g. “Yes, sorr!” the Irish maid says). The same gags are endlessly repeated (e.g. Ned is oh, so tired - but - ho ho! - his sleep is interrupted again; or, Cyril the Dog is anthropomorphized and funny!). And - worst of all - I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE CATHEDRAL. OR THE BIRD STUMP. OR WHO MARRIES WHO. I also don't care for the uber-twee Anglogasm setting, full of dreadfully English things and words and people. Or the weird sexism, where the female characters are divided between (1) objectified, or (2) completely ridiculous (giggly, or shrewish, or just stupid).

You let me down, S.F. Masterworks series!

This was recommended years ago while I was working on a video game about time travel. And it's pretty much exactly what you'd want from a time travel story: just enough fake science to make things interesting, but not so much to make everything tedious. Plus it's clear the author loves the setting and time period, to say nothing of the book's namesake.

It's more Victorian comedy of errors than science fiction, although there's plenty of both. And I would say it's slightly too long, even if it hadn't taken me several years to get through it – several of the concepts and character definitions are just repeated instead of being explored in more detail, and one of the “big reveals” is blatantly telegraphed at least two chapters too early, making the characters seem a little dense. Overall, though, it does a fantastic job of feeling simultaneously contemporary and old-fashioned, and both unsentimental and heart-warming.

This book was a lot of fun. It put together two of my favorite things, science fiction and history. This time travel story is very clever with its multiple story lines that all weave together.

I stumbled across this book a year or two ago looking for something new to read, and while I'm not the fastest reader, I have to say this one kept my attention. Often I set a book down and don't come back to it for days or even weeks or more, which makes getting back into the story difficult, but this one had no problem pulling me back in each time.

It's one (very small) part science fiction (due to the aspect of time travel), one part mystery, one part historical (covering mostly victorian times, but also the attack on Coventry in World War II), one part farce, and one part romance. That description might lead you to wonder how such a storyline could even work, but somehow, Willis makes it work, and you can't help but enjoy the mystery, as well as the wry humor of the main character, Ned, who is hiding out in the Victorian era to keep away from a madwoman who wants him to find one of the most hideous artifacts of all time.

Even when the characters are comical, they lend so much to the feel of the time Ned is in, and his quest to figure out what happened to the Bishop's Bird Stump gives the story a sense of urgency that might not have worked with any of the other aspects of the story.

If you're a fan of soft science fiction, or romance that features plot (and a central male character over a female one) over passion, I highly recommend this. Even more if you're a fan of science fiction and mystery, because that is exactly what this is. A sci-fi mystery with a twist.

I look forward to reading my way through the rest of her works. If they're all as fun as this one, I know I'll enjoy them.

I thought this book started a bit slow but it was definitely fun to read. Time traveling historians are struggling to correct an incongruity because someone has done something and its disturbed the timeline of history. The historians interact with characters from Victorian England and struggle to maintain proper manners while also struggling to ensure the world doesn't get horribly screwed up because of someone's inadvertent actions. Its humorous and well-written.

Another time travl book by Connie Willis. Very amusing but not as fabulous as the Doomsday Book. A series of misunderstandings, in multiple times, is downright hysterical. Another poor student is sent into the past to make sure that the present doesn't get impacted by the accidental transport of a CAT from the 19th century to the 21st century

I got this book in an unexpected book trade with someone, and enjoyed the read. It's subtly amusing - if you're not looking for the humor, you probably won't find it, but also a fun story.

I read two Connie Willis books before I read Lincoln's Dreams. They were To
Say Nothing of the Dog and The Doomsday Book. Both dealt with time travel.
To Say Nothing of the Dog was a fresh book for me and I recommended it to
others. The Doomsday Book, an older book of Willis, was very similar and I
did not like it as much..

I did look forward to reading Lincoln's Dreams. Very disappointing. I did
not want to finish it. I kept wondering why this book was published. It
seemed poorly edited. Lots of problems with the storyline.

I find that people who love science fiction seem to overlook problems with
the plot or character development. They seem so taken with the genre that
they are not always especially discriminating.

I hope I'm not overgeneralizing.