To Say Nothing of the Dog

Anything with a reference to [b:Three Men in a Boat|4921|Three Men in a Boat|Jerome K. Jerome|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1392791656s/4921.jpg|4476508] is worth a try :)

Only as superb a writer as Connie Willis could take a story as chaotic as this one and make it work. ( )

This is the follow-up book to the sci-fi time-travel book - The Doomsday Book. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book, but was initially less enthused by the successor.
The Doomsday Book had a good balamnce of sci-fi, time-travel and a light tone which made for a fun read.
The new book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, struggled to achieve the same balance. I found the humour less humouress, and the plot descended first into farce and then into silliness. Fortunately, after the first third of the book, the balance came together again. There is not doubt that the author is highly skilled. I think the silliness that put me off may have been an attempt to capture some of the frivolity of Three Men in a Boat, on which the first part of the book is closely linked.
From that point on the book gets better and better. There are lots of interesting references to other books, both high literature and Agatha Christie; many references to historical incidents and repercussions; and many references to locations in England - all very pleasing to this reader. And enough time-travel conundrums to simulate the frequent references to the who-dunnits. ( )

The blurb on this make you expect something hilarious and this wasn't that. but it had a certain charm, and was most certainly amusing in a Victorian drawing room farce kind of way.
I admit that I am very fussy when it comes to playing with the laws of physics, so a book using time travel is probably not going to be right in my wheelhouse. but this manages to pull it off very neatly. I can suspend disbelief and allow the author to break one rule of physics, or introduce one inexplicable thing, but only so long as the remainder of the book all makes scientific logical sense. And while this does allow timetravel, it alos has rules about how it is used, that you can only go backwards, that you can;t take anything that didn;t exist at the time and that you can't intentionally change the nature of history. So you can't go back in time with the intent to assissinate Hitler (no matter how much you might like to). I like a world that runs to certain rules, so this all made the acceptance of timetravel seem far more normal.
The openeing surmise has the story set in 2057, where Lady Schrapnell is buolding a copy of Coventry Cathedral, as it stood just before it was burnt down in the Blitz. She's building this in Oxford, of course. And as part of her researches she has sent historians all over the early 20th century to check various items, their location and to get details of what they looked like. The last item is the oddly named Bishop's Bird Stump, a ghastly piece of Victoriana that was seen by Lady Schrapnell's ancestor, when it changed her life. After quite some time rooting around in Coventry before and on the night of the Blitz, Ned gets severe time lag and gets sent to the Victorian era for a rest and to escape Lady Schrapnell. Only he also has a task to complete that he's not entirely paid attention to... And so the Victorian comedty of manners begins.
The other thing to love about this is the sheer number of loterary references it manages to pack in. Lord Peter Wimsey & Hercule Poriot get name checked, as does Three men in a boat. You've got to love a Historian who can pinpoint his date by which Christie novel has just been published. >:-)
It was noticable that in this book published in 1998 that there was a pandemic in the early 21st century, the author was just a few years out...
I can think of far worse ways to spend time that hurtling around a Victorian summer, trying to save the world by making sure that certain people end up in the right place at the right time to not change the course of history. It might not have bene laugh out loud funny, but it certainly made me smile multiple times. And that's no bad thin.g ( )

Just as good as Doomsday Book, but much more cheerful. Reminded me, more than anything, of Jeeves and Wooster. And there's a cat!

(Cats are supposedly extinct in the future, which is probably the most implausible thing in the book. There is no animal humanity would work harder to save!) ( )