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Books and Cooks Ithaca -- October 2000

To Say Nothing of the Dog

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 To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

Discussion date: Monday, October 23, 2000

Discussion place: Susannah's Place

From Booklist
What a stitch! Willis' delectable romp through time from 2057 back to Victorian England, with a few side excursions into World War II and medieval Britain, will have readers happily glued to the pages. Rich dowager Lady Schrapnell has invaded Oxford University's time travel research project in 2057, promising to endow it if they help her rebuild Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by a Nazi air raid in 1940. In effect, she dragoons almost everyone in the program to make trips back in time to locate items--in particular, the bishop's bird stump, an especially ghastly example of Victorian decorative excess. Time traveler Ned Henry is suffering from advanced time lag and has been sent, he thinks, for rest and relaxation to 1888, where he connects with fellow time traveler Verity Kindle and discovers that he is actually there to correct an incongruity created when Verity inadvertently brought something forward from the past. Take an excursion through time, add chaos theory, romance, plenty of humor, a dollop of mystery, and a spoof of the Victorian novel, and you end up with what seems like a comedy of errors but is actually a grand scheme "involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork." 

From Kirkus Reviews , October 15, 1997
 Comic yarn set in the same time-traveling universe as the splendid Doomsday Book (1992), with some of the minor characters in common. In 2057, the fearsome, slave-driving Lady Schrapnell has lent her authority and her money to developing time travel so that she can rebuild Old Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by Nazi bombs in 1940. After too many recent missions, operative Ned Henry is timelagged and in need of a complete rest. But Lady Schrapnell has another vital task for poor Ned: to locate a grotesque Victorian artifact known as the bishop's bird stump. A chronological complication that Ned is only dimly aware of, though, has arisen and must be fixed before history is changed. So a bewildered Ned finds himself in Oxford in 1889, wearing boating clothes, accompanied by a mountain of luggage, a regal cat in a box, and no idea what he's supposed to do next. Finally, after drifting along the river in an unintentional parody of Three Men in a Boat, he locates his contact, Verity Kindle (she caused the problem in the first place). There's a downside to all this slapstick, of course: Unless Ned and Verity resolve the problem, the Nazis will win WW II. Gleeful fun with a serious edge, set forth in an almost impeccable English accent.

The Books and Cooks To Say Nothing of the Dog Informal Reading Guide
(member-generated questions in no particular order)

  • Why were the most Victorian characters not from the Victorian era?

  • Did you read the chapter sub-headings before reading the chapter, after reading the chapter, both, or not at all? If you read them, what did you think?

  • Were you familiar with "Three Men in a Boat" before reading this? If not, do you have any interest in reading it now?

  • Were there fewer obscure references as the book progressed or did I just get better at ignoring them? If there were fewer, why?

  • Was there anything important to say about the dog?

  • One thing that bugs me about time-travel books is the paradoxes that arise. Did this book address these sufficiently?

  • So, have you worked out what sequence of events was before and after the incongruity?

  • Was the ending satisfying? Can you think of a better ending?

  • How was the book similar to mystery novels, particularly 1930s mystery novels (if you have read them)?

  • Do you think it added anything to find, at the end, that everything was part of a correction for a far-future event (or do you think it was gratuitous - not to be leading or anything)?

  • Did the "rules of time travel" in this book make any sense?

  • Who was Lady Schrapnell and how did she get so much power?

  • Would you read another book by this author?

  • When John Cleese came to Cornell a few weeks ago, he said that the British laugh at ridiculous situations and Americans like the 'wise-crack'. To what extent is this book British humor?

This Page Last Revised: February 18, 2001.