To Say Nothing Of The Dog by Connie Willis

One has not lived until one has

carried a sixty-pound dog down a

sweeping flight of stairs at

half-past V in the morning.

For someone who enjoys maintaining the illusion that he knows a bit about literature and the writers who write it, I find I often lead off with contradictory disclaimers such as that which follows. I knew very, very little about Connie Willis prior to picking up a copy of this in my local Indie bookshop; it was an impulse purchase – SF Masterworks are few and far between in the gentrified stratum of Penarth’s main strip – so I grabbed it whilst collecting the latest Dog Man for my eldest wee fella. What I now know, if nothing else, is that she can write a pretty convincing and gently humorous novel about time-travel.

Our time-traveling academic hero, Ned Henry, frazzled by one (or more) too many jumps back in time for the crazed reconstruction project of the draconian Lady Schrapnell, is offered the chance to recuperate in the idyllic surroundings of the Victorian-era Thames river, punting and mucking about and whatnot. Unfortunately, his trip doesn’t quite go to plan as it transpires the temporal slippage encountered in previous trips was the signifier of something bigger and more involved than the missing Bishop’s Birdstump (of which no more anon), and his holiday turns into some sort of Victoria farce, chaperoning a straw-boatered twit up the Thames, saving a stereotypical Don from drowning, dealing with a spoilt dilettante (no spoilers, but she owns a most important diary), and running across Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in the process, to say nothing of the etc. Indeed, there are a number of subtle and not-so-subtle appearances from other works of literature, notably Dorothy Sayers, the aforementioned Mr Jerome and chums, and, if I remember correctly, Agatha Christie*.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, it all turns into a comedy of manners, with our anachronistic and buffaloed interlopers careening about the place a la PG Wodehouse, sure they’re messing everything up but as ever harbouring the vague hope it’ll all turn out fine in the end, and through it all the running joke about jumble sales. It’s masterfully done, if playing somewhat on the archetypes of the dim young toff, the insufferably brattish love interest, the absent-minded academic and so on, and she gets away with a lot because of her super use of language and understanding of British sardonicism and sarcasm. I find out subsequently that it’s one of a series of books based in the same academic time-travel faculty of Oxford University so I may yet stumble across Blackout or All Clear and feel the need to give one of them a go. Gentle humour, yes, but with a serious premise at the heart.

*Sorry, but I can’t be arsed to go back and check.

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