To Say Nothing of the Dog is a shaggy-dog tale complete with a preternaturally quiet, time-traveling cat, Princess Arjumand, who might well be the cause of some serious temporal incongruities-for even a mouser might change the course of European history. Willis is concerned, however, as is her confused character, with getting Victoriana right, and Ned makes a good amateur anthropologist-entering one crowded room, he realizes that "the reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over." Though he's still not sure what he's supposed to bring back, various of his confederates keep popping back to set him to rights.
Once he returns something to someone (he's too exhausted to understand what or to whom) on June 7, 1888, he's free. (Willis is happily unconcerned with futuristic vraisemblance, though Ned makes some obligatory references to "vids," "interactives," and "headrigs.") The only way Ned can get the necessary two weeks' R and R is to perform one more drop and recuperate in the past, away from Lady Schrapnell. Once he's been whisked through the rather quaint Net back to the Oxford future, Ned is in a state of super time-lag. All he knows is that if they don't find it, the powerful Lady Schrapnell will keep sending them back in time, again and again and again. When we first meet Ned, in 1940, he and five other time jumpers are searching bombed-out Coventry Cathedral for the bishop's bird stump, an object about which neither he nor the reader will be clear for hundreds of pages. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a fine, and fun, romance-an amused examination of conceptions and misconceptions about other eras, other people. What Connie Willis soon makes clear is that genre can go to the dogs. (Or, more accurately, Jerome will earlier immortalize Ned's fumbling, because Ned is from the 21st century and Jerome from the 19th.)
Jerome will later immortalize Ned's fumbling. In one scene the hero, Ned Henry, and his friends come upon Jerome, two men, and the dog Montmorency in-you guessed it-a boat. Jerome's singular, and hilarious, Three Men in a Boat. Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle? Its title is the subtitle of Jerome K. Or is it a Victorian novel in the guise of a time-traveling tale, or a highly comic romp, or a great, allusive literary game, complete with spry references to Dorothy L.
To Say Nothing of the Dog is a science-fiction fantasy in the guise of an old-fashioned Victorian novel, complete with epigraphs, brief outlines, and a rather ugly boxer in three-quarters profile at the start of each chapter.
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