Book: To say nothing of the dog

[liv]

Author: Connie Willis

Details: (c)1998 Connie Willis; pub Bantam 1998; ISBN 0-553-57538-4

Verdict: To say nothing of the dog took me a while to get into, but ended up being exciting and funny.

Reasons for reading it: It's very much a classic and lots of people with good taste enthuse about it.

How it came into my hands: The bargain table at The Strand, yay!

I have never been able to get very worked up about Three men in a boat, and when I started To say nothing of the dog I thought it might be close enough pastiche to have the same set of problems. Plus an additional one, namely that Willis really, really can't write British English, and this is a big flaw in a book where the whole point is to parody the romantic idea of Englishness. So I was carrying this around in my handbag for about a week, and finding myself using what little reading time I had for browsing newspapers, magazines or the internet, or reading some of hatam_soferet's wonderful collection of early 20^th century children's classics. (On rereading, Streatfeild's White Boots is really very good indeed, btw.)

I did eventually find myself caring about the characters (there are a lot of them) and the time travel plot (in spite of its intentionally ludicrous intricacy). I also got to the point where I could overlook the Americanisms, and the running jokes became funny instead of irritating. So I zipped through the second half in a few hours of unbroken reading. I think it partly just took me a while to get into, and partly the pacing is slightly off, there are a couple of hundred pages of nothing very much happening before it starts to get exciting. hatam_soferet gave me very wise and sensible orders for my last day of convalescence: not to be foolish and think I was feeling well enough to make it into class, but to make sure to get out of the house even if it was only to sit in the local park and read. I did miss a whole two and a half days of class, which I'm sad about, but the apart from rather enjoying obeying hatam_soferet the argument that swayed me was not wanting to infect all those unfortunate New Yorkers on the subway who might not have health insurance or robust immune systems. But anyway, I took the book to the park and didn't quite notice the hours passing; it was lucky I made it back to hatam_soferet's in time for Shabbat candles!

I think you have to be in the right mood for the kind of silly TSNotD embraces, but if you like that kind of humour it is certainly done very well. The characters are interesting and three-dimensional in spite of being comic stereotypes. I think what made the book for me was the relationship between Ned and Verity; of course it's predictable, but it's very vivid. Some of the other female characters are closer to being sexist stereotypes than I'd ideally like, the nagging, overbearing termagant and the hopelessly frivolous, excessively girlie bimbo, but then all the characters are over the top so it's perhaps not surprising. I also got a little impatient with the underlying assumption that America is such a wonderfully classless society and Britain is so backward and feudal, but that's not a terrible bias for a book to have and it doesn't get in the way of the story much.

I can see why TSNotD is rated so highly, because it's doing some quite clever things as well as masses of silly humour. And I did very much find myself caught up in the story this afternoon, which outweighs a great number of minor quibbles.

Comments

[forestofglory]

I think I'm glad I 1st read this before I lived in the UK -- I didn't notice the Americanisms, but I think I would now.

[lethargic_man]

It wasn't the Americanisms so much that narked me as the fact Willis evidently believed the English were still as formal at the time of writing as in the nineteenth century. I could just about buy it for the twenty-first century sections, as a return to formality (and a return to abbreviating Edward to Ned, rather than Ed or Ted), but the suspended disbelief came crashing down for the twentieth-century sections.

[leora]

I enjoyed it, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped to given how many people say it is her best book. I still like Bellwether better, and also I had the misfortune of reading the short story "Fire Watch" first. I have heard someone who read them in the reverse order claim that "Fire Watch" just seemed kind of pointless given To Say Nothing of the Dog, it didn't add anything to the universe. This is somewhat true, and basically my problem with To Say Nothing of the Dog was that too much of what I found cool about it was also in Fire Watch (I think that was the name of the short story).

It's a good book though. I did enjoy reading it.