To Say Nothing of the Dog

[shipperx]

So, after bitching about the Sookie Stackhouse Mystery Dead to the World yesterday, I started reading something entirely different. 

I chose Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog .  It takes place in the same universe as Willis's more recent novel Blackout, which is to say that it takes place (or at least starts) in the future, in the time after the invention of time travel.  Having concluded that there's no great financial gain to be made from time travel because -- in theory-- they can't change history nor can they bring anything back from the past, time travel has been left to the researchers, historians, and scientists.  In Blackout  this has led to several historians becoming stranded in World War II  (and I'm still waiting for the second half of Blackout  -  All Clear that is due out in the fall)

TSNofD also has a WWII connection in that it starts with yet another historian in England just after the Blitz.  In this case, someone in the historian's present (which is to say our future) is rebuilding a cathedral that has been destroyed and they've sent our hero back to gather information so that the rebuilt cathedral will be historically accurate. 

This time around the problem with time travel doesn't seem to be that it stops working (as it appeared to do in Blackout because they may or may not have changed the future) but that repeated trips to the past have cumulative side effects.  Ned, the lead character, has done an excessive number of jumps, causing him to suffer 'the worst case of time lag that anyone has ever seen'. 

Time lag appears to have a lot of in common with being drunk because sufferers become overly sentimental, prone to poetic jags, hear things incorrectly (so lots of info that the reader gets is a bit... odd.  Ned is an unreliable narrator).  Anyway, Ned is caught between two bosses.  The first keeps sending him into the past so that they can have the cathedral finished on schedule (thus this boss is the cause for Ned's timelag) .  The second boss is pissed that all the historians on his staff have been pulled into to someone else's pet project.  The second boss decides to hide Ned from the first boss by stashing Ned in Victorian England (figuring that Ned can have a nice, peaceful rest there, do a job that boss #2 wants done, and hide Ned, thus sufficiently pissing off boss #1).  

Did I mention that this time the aim of the story is clearly comedic?

From what I've pieced together from  time-lagged information and misinformation,  house cats are extinct in the future, and a female historian who has been working in Victorian England managed, somehow, to take a cat into the future.  Everyone is wondering how... except Ned who is too preoccupied with drunken time-lagged insta-infatuation with the female historian.

It's been fairly lighthearted so far and I'm hoping that his drunken time-lagged trip to the past will be just as lighthearted.  I could be happy with a light, fluffy read.

Comments

[peroxidepirate.livejournal.com]

*flails* I love To Say Nothing of the Dog, and (don't worry, no spoilers) it does remain fun and fluffy throughout. I didn't know about Blackout, so thanks for that!

If you ever happen across Doomsday Book, which is also in the same universe, it's another kettle of fish entirely: incredibly well written, but in such an intense, heart-wrenching kind of way that I've only ever managed to read it once.

[elsaf]

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a favorite book of mine. The best of the Connie Willis books, IMHO, though, I haven't read Blackout yet.