From Connie Willis, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, comes a comedic romp through an unpredictable world of mystery, love, and time travel… Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He’s been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop’s bird stump. It’s part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi … Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier. But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right–not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself. From the Paperback edition.
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Time travel tale from Connie Willis. Very good.
I’m a late comer to Connie Willis’ writing, Too bad for me. This and the other books in the Oxford Time Travel series are difficult to put down. You just have to see what happens next.
If you love reading a wide variety of books, make sure this is one of them. It is so entertaining and refers to so many characters that you probably at least know in passing.
One of my new favorite authors- terrific book with an old time nod to Agatha Christie and Lord Peter Wimsey. Great read and great introduction to a great author.
Think about for favorite situational comedy. Now add some time travel back to 1888 England into the mix. You end up with this whimsical romp through time. Great fun. I highly recommend.
Loved this book. Entertaining and fun.
Started so slowly and poorly that I only read the first part and gave it up.
Connie Willis has a unique twist on time travel: the “net” through which travelers access other times is self-correcting. Not only can one not travel to a time in which one has already lived, one cannot bring “through the net” anything that might cause an anachronistic incongruity. Crisis points are even more tightly controlled: no one can travel to Waterloo, for example, or get close to the grassy knoll.
So when in *To Say Nothing of the Dog*, Ned Henry is dragooned by Lady Shrapnell into traveling back in time to research the “bishop’s bird stump” at Coventry Cathedral just before it was destroyed in the Blitz, he is baffled by his inability to find it. Back and forth he goes, getting more and more time-lagged as he visits jumble sales (“maybe it was sold as a white elephant”), the bombed-out smoking remains of the cathedral (“That’s a cat! I thought it would be the size of a wolf, somehow…”) and the putative peace and quiet of the Victorian age.
The last visit is necessary because somehow, a cat (extinct in 2067) has been brought forward through the net. Ned is volunteered to take it back, and somehow get Lady Shrapnell’s great-great-great-grandmother to visit Coventry so that she will write about the bishop’s bird stump in her diary, because, so Lady Shrapnell will be inspired to rebuild Coventry Cathedral and restore the bishop’s bird stump to its rightful place in history and the hearts of Englishmen.
Mr. Dunworthy and Finch, whom we met in *The Doomsday Book*, are back. They want to make sure the net stays open and history happens. Lady Shrapnell is determined to get the cathedral rebuilt on time, *with* the bishop’s bird stump, despite the laws of physics—besides, “laws are made to be broken.” Professor Peddick wants to defeat his rival Overforce with his ideas of a “Grand Design” that “shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may.” Verity Kindle wants to make sure the cat she rescued isn’t drowned, “incongruity or not.” Ned just wants to get a full night’s sleep.
What transpires out of this knot of competing ambitions is a wonderful comedy of manners, with modern perspective applied with liberal amounts of humor and allusion. History is used as a sustaining structure seen by the participants in the way we note limbs, leaves and stems on a tree: as a confusing mass dimly perceived in detail, and really understood only as a gestalt “tree.” (Even while Lady Shrapnell reminds us that “God is in the details,” we see clearly that using computer models to guide our choices is a poor strategy, because “that’s the problem with models—they only include the details people think are relevant…”.)
It is also an Agatha-Christie-style mystery whose deftly-handled clues span 700 years of history. At least. The wonder of Willis’ writing is that the novel succeeds brilliantly on every level, and rewards re-reading with new insights each time.
I recommend it highly.
I’ve read this book about 3 or 4 times. It is one of my comfort books. It has humor, a dog, a cat and men in a boat. It is unique delightful book. Connie Willis is an excellent author and I’ve enjoyed most of her books. This is my favorite.
One of her best!
Love the combination of Sci-fi future, Victorian England, and the little of the here and now
This is one of my favorite time-travel books. Connie Willis is that rare SF writer who is relatively uninterested in the “how” of time travel, only the results. In this particular instance, the results are hilarious as the main character searches for something called “the Bishop’s Bird Stump” during the late Victorian period. His take on why Victorian’s were so repressed is worth the price of the book.
Connie Willis is without flaw as a writer. It’s always a pleasure to read her stories and novels.
I loved this book. I am a Connie Willis fan and this book did not disappoint. For anyone who doesn’t know, it is loosely modeled on a book entitled “Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog)”, by Jerome K. Jerome. It’s worth checking out too. Willis’ book is more lush and complicated (her twists and turns are delightful), but it creates the good humor of the original. Only a handful of people have devised their own time travel universe that seems real enough to visit. Connie Willis is one of the handful. And she is funny!
Time travel is always a challenge to write about. What laws will the writer assume pertain?
Here we have a royal romp through the past (1940’s) by people traveling from the future at the behest of a very strong willed and wealthy woman.
Chaos and amusement follow.
A delightful comedy of errors if all the errors were caused by time travel.