Book Review: To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel #2) by Connie Willis
After falling in love with The Doomsday Book, I obviously had to read the next in Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel series, To Say Nothing of the Dog.
If The Doomsday Book is the series’ tragedy, To Say Nothing of the Dog is its comedy. I’d even class it as a romantic comedy.
My beloved Mr Dunworthy again features, as does his secretary, Finch, but not nearly as much as I would have liked.
Unlike in The Doomsday Book, there is only one narrator, our hero Ned, and most of the action is set in the past. The few scenes set in the present (the characters’ present that is, our future) are pretty brief and usually in the Oxford time travel lab.
If you’re like my mother and get confused by time travel and its consequences etc, this isn’t the book for you. The major plot line is driven by what would happen if someone from the future changed events in the past. In fact, this is why Ned is required to return to Victorian England, 1888, to correct an issue a fellow time traveller, Verity, caused.
Only, due to his jetlag-like state and a series of miscommunication and misadventure, Ned fails miserably for most of the time and actually suspects he’s caused more time paradoxes.
There’s a fun cast of supporting characters in 1888, all quite hilarious. Willis uses every single stereotype from the time and I loved it. The characterisation of each is so polished that they all have their moment to shine. Even Cyril, the dog, and Princess Arjumand, the cat, are more well developed than some characters I’ve read in other books. (The animals and their sleeping arrangements amused me greatly.)
Baine, the butler, was my particular favourite. The fact that he is obviously much smarter than his employers is a sad reality of the times.
If I didn’t think the book was good enough already, Willis won me over completely by adding several references to Lord Peter Wimsey books. The characters talk about (and compare themselves to) Lord Peter and Harriet Vane on multiple occasions. And at one stage the characters even have a seance, where Verity uses tricks she learnt from Strong Poison’s Miss Climpson.
Ned and Verity’s main mystery to solve is who ‘Mr C’ is. I did guess this quite early on, but it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm. It only showed how good Willis is at writing UST and chemistry between the characters.
The other mystery in the book simmers in the background in such a way that you don’t even realise it is a mystery until you reach the action packed climactic scene. The way Willis uses tension and weaves the storylines together so that you eventually have a dawning reality of what has happened is extremely clever.
You can easily read this as a stand-alone, or as the first in the series. However, I would recommend reading in the correct order so that the heart Willis ripped out of your chest with The Doomsday Book can be healed by To Say Nothing of the Dog.
5 out of 5 and can’t wait to read the next in the series.
Advertisements Share this:
