#to say nothing of the dog

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #35 – To Say Nothing Of The Dog by Connie Willis

This was my second shot on reading something of Willis’, and I found it far more enjoyable than the first. Which is something of a feat, honestly – it’s a rare book that you can more-or-less accurately describe s a ‘cozy romcom’ that doesn’t make me recoil. But it was charming! And dated, but mostly only charmingly as well.

The story is the second in a series, which no one ever told me when recommending it because it does not matter in the slightest (at least, I had no issues at all following along with the story) – though it does mean that it hits the ground running and requires you to pick up quite a bit from context for the first while. It follows Ned Henry, a historian at the University of Oxford in the mid-21st century – a field that has been changed dramatically by the invention of time travel. For example, it’s suddenly in desperate need of particle-accelerator money, which is why and the entire rest of the department have been conscripted by an incredibly generous donor to help her reconstruct Coventry Cathedral exactly as it was before being destroyed in the Blitz. Exactly. ‘God is in the details’, and Henry has spent subjective weeks running himself ragged attending wartime rummage sales and sifting through bombed out ruins to try and verify the fate of a glorified flower pot mainly notable for being overdone and ugly even by Victorian standards.

After going through so many rapid-fire temporal shifts that the jump sickness leaves him waxing rhapsodic about the highway and falling in love with every woman he sees, he’s sent to Victorian Oxford to lay low and recuperate, and deliver a vitally important package to a contact already in situ. Unfourtunately that jump sickness means that he’s pretty unclear on the particular what and who. Really it’s remarkable that things don’t spin even more wildly out of control than they do (and there’s a period where he might have accidentally made the nazis win WW2).

So yeah, not what you’d call a serious novel. Most of the plot is sneaking around trying to make sure various members of the Victorian gentry fall in love in the right pattern to make sure someone’s grandson can fly in the RAF down the line and someone else elopes off to America on schedule (with drastically limited details and new information from back home changing things ever so often). Also sneaking a pampered rare-fish-hunting pet cat and slothful bulldog around before they arouse the wrath of their hosts. The apocalyptic threat that’s theoretically hanging over everyone never really feels real, and it’s all just pleasently absurd and enjoyable to read.

The comedy reminds me of early Prachett, in a way? Which like, a light comedy from the ‘90s in large part poking fun at English academia, of course there are similarities, but still. Not that that’s n insult. There’s plenty of absurd situations caused by miscommunication or desperately trying to work around absurd social conventions or personal foibles. Almost the entire Victorian cast (and a decent number of the present-day characters as well) are objectively ridiculous people, and the book has a lot of fun making do the literary equivalent of chewing scenery for the camera.

I call this a romcom, but I’m not ever sure that fits, honestly. It is a comedy with romance, between the two lead characters, whose dynamic with each other is the main throughline of the book. But it’s never really a source of drama? Or a motor of the plot. They are coworkers who end up working in close confines and get alone fine, who both awkwardly admit they find each other very attractive and start flirting and at the end they kiss and adopt a cat together. Least miscommunication- or conflict-ridden central romance in fiction you’ve ever seen. I don’t know enough about the genre constraints to determine whether it counts or not.

Part of the appeal of this was honestly the odd ways it came across as a bit dated? Not at all in a bad way but just, like – the fixation on the Blitz as the sine qua non of English history feels very 20th century? The references to the Charge of the Light Brigade and Schrodinger’s Box and Three Men in a Boat, combined with the felt obligation to step back from the narrative and explain what they were in case the reader wasn’t aware – just the idea that someone reading a time travel story won’t already be familiar with the concept of temporal paradoxes, really. It all added up to a reading experience that felt a bit off-kilter in a pleasing way.

This is obviously a story very fascinated by Victoriana – both the time period and the popular memory. Its perspective on the period is – I guess ‘affectionate contempt’ might be the best way to put it? It clearly doesn’t think much of the Oxfordshire gentry, the women shallow as a puddle and obsessed with marriage gossip and spiritualism, the men with their heads stuffed with some academic fixation and utterly divorced from all practical affairs, both obsessed with petty one-up-man-ship of their peers and casually abusive and callous towards the servants who run and organize their lives for them. But it all feels rather good-natured; not a trace of righteous fury or real class hatred is on display, the fact of the empire and the source of their fortunes is I think not even mentioned. One more way it feels a bit dated, I suppose, or maybe just a way my usual reading’s much more explicitly political about these things.

I’m also not sure if this is a matter of tastes or popular memory changing or just my impression of what the received common wisdom is being parochial or inaccurate, but – given the association of ‘Victorian’ with imperial grandeur, aesthetic superiority, eye-wateringly expensive historical real estate, etc, it is quite funny how the book takes for granted that to be ‘victorian’ means to be horrifically gaudy and over-designed, devoid of elegance or restraint, and to have probably ruined some real medieval beauty in its creation.

Anyway yes, you absolutely could dig into this book and write some meaty essays out of it, but I simply was not reading it closely enough to do so. It’s probably overlong and definitely meandering and unhurried, but I did find it a really enjoyable read.

[atlinmerrick]

Chinna Vivaralu (Little Things)

To Say Nothing of the Dog (No Seriously, They Don't Mention the Dogs)

Stories have been told about Bheem and Ram, books written, legends fashioned. However, in all these fine tales told, one things has been left out: they say nothing about Rama Raju's and Bheema's dogs.

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[bethanydelleman]

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome

Discovering that you have cancer on Web M.D. before the internet existed; apparently this is not a new problem.

[sonictoaster]

I made a slipcase for my re-covered copy of To Say Nothing of the Dog, paired with the text that inspired it, Three Men in a Boat.

I made a little collage of images for the cover of the slipcase: St Paul’s in London, (a significant landmark in the Oxford Time Travel books), the ruins of Coventry Cathedral after it was bombed in the war, the Northern lights standing in for the Veil, and Tissot’s ladies on a boat (The Gallery of the HMS Calcutta).

[leomonae]

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis

[beartrice-inn-unnir]

👋 for the book reader asks: 3, 7, and 12?

3. What’s something you read recently and wanted to argue with (either with the book or the author or the fans)?

Maybe the Library at Mount Char - I liked it a lot, but I have a whole collection of books I call “Books about Libraries that are really Private Archives”. LaMC is only the most recent addition that I’ve read.

And it’s true, for a long long time up to the very recent past, libraries were usually private collections of resources which were only available to small affiliated groups. The Public Library is recent idea and the huge swathe of public social services the average (American) Public Library provides shouldn’t fall entirely on this one underfunded organization that can have insufficient training in social work etc. See this excellent Vocational Awe article for more info.

But I still want to read a book with a magical library that’s open to the public, that provides services and educational events, that supports its community, but isn’t hard to find. I really love a lot of these magical private library books, but the ubiquity of access is really important to the modern library (in some places anyway), and I’d love to read something that shows that someday.

5. What book do you love but usually not recommend because it’s weird or intense, etc?

I utterly adore Katherine Addison’s The Witness for the Dead, but it’s so hard to describe (and, as a result, to recommend) - the setting is so lush and the characters are such a product of their setting and life-experiences. It’s a non-violent crime novel. It’s very religious and spiritual. There might be werewolves. There are murderous ghouls. There’s opera and air-ships. It’s a detective novel. It’s a political thriller. It’s slow-moving and deeply kind. The protagonist is having a very long week. It’s only 232 pages long.

12. What book have you re-read most often?

I pick up Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog whenever I need a break from other things in life, so probably every few months on the outside 😹 I love that if I ever don’t understand what’s happening, the protagonist understands even less than I do. He’s overtired and overworked, and it’s made him into a soppy romantic who keeps mishearing people but is too polite to ask for clarification. I relate.

Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and Tamora Piece’s In The Hand of the Goddess are two other comfort rereads that I have as audiobooks, so they probably are the stories I’ve read/heard the most often by sheer numbers.

[likesdoodling]

Some more dance cards! From the top-

Row well ye Mariners- This is solely a play on the name. I could not pass up this golden opportunity. It was just too good. In case you don’t get the reference, we have George, J and Harris, (to say nothing of the dog,) from three men in a boat. 

The Ship’s Cook- From Emma, the tv show one if I remember correctly. This may be a little confusing to anyone not in our specific dance group, but there’s a bit after you stop chasse-ing (I really don’t know how to spell that so eh) where you have to do a little dance on the spot. Everyone was basically doing their own thing and we never specified any particular steps so I figured the anachronism would be pretty funny. 

:D

[roseunspindle]

Books I Want to Read in 2024 Part 1

[literary-illuminati]

To Say Nothing Of The Dog so far agreeing with me much more than the other stuff of Willis' I've read did.

(I am perfectly aware it's because she and Prachett were writing at about the same time and poking fun at the same institutions, but so far kind of reminiscent of some of the Unseen University stuff in discworld?)

[broomchickabroom]

“Yes, well, you surprised me is all. And made me angry, and made me think. I’ve been thinking all day.”

“Pity.” In three days, everything changes.

A canon compliant look at the courtship between Tossie & Baine that ultimately results in their elopement.

[mikimeiko]

Books I read in 2023

To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis (1997)

[reloha]

There is something like this in the Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis.

tv shows with time travel organizations/bureaus/police/agencies/whatever should have a department with instead of a tech genius eating candy, it’s a harried seamstress or fashion designer who is like

“1450 italy? does it look like I have the time to dye you wool? nO. YOU’RE GOING TO THE 1980s”

and throws shoulder pads at the hapless time agent

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Dog Meshi.

[yzdisguyz]

Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

From: three men in a boat ( to say nothing of The Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome.

[literary-illuminati]

A thing I always find interesting when reading is what sort of references and concepts they assume the reader is already familiar with, and what they feel obligated to explain.

You see this with genre tropes a lot, of course - does the urban fantasy story feel the need to provide mythologies for vampires and werewolves and their interactions and why the masquerade functions, or does it just kind of make a vague gesture and assume you're on board? - but it's kind of an interesting way to see what the author felt was common knowledge in terms of general info, too.

Like, To Say Nothing Of The Dog actually feels the need to explain what both the Charge of the Light Brigade and Schrodinger's Box were after name-checking them, which kind of sticks out as something I feel like a similiar book written today wouldn't?