To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis
Connie Willis has long been on the list of authors I know I really really ought to read but just haven't gotten around to yet. With such people, it often takes some specific trigger to move them off the "ought to read" list into the physical "to be read in the immediate future" pile; in Willis' case, the trigger was In Ashes Lie, for which I decided to read her plague novel The Doomsday Book. I had some pacing issues with that one, but it got me over the hurdle into actually reading Willis instead of just thinking about reading her, and as a result, I picked up To Say Nothing of the Dog.
Hee. Hee hee heh ooh eh. This has many of the elements of The Doomsday Book, arranged into a configuration I like much better. Time travel, historical geekery, monomaniac characters driven toward rather inexplicable goals, but this time it's funny instead of overwhelmingly tragic. To the extent that TDB is considered the better book, I honestly think it's because our society has a hard time granting importance to comic material. But this one, with its boaters and ruffles and bulldogs and jumble sales and nacreous ryunkins and penwipers and bishop's bird stumps, is just fabulous.
You need a tolerance for time travel stories, and most especially for time travel stories
that turn out to be way more tangled than they appear at first. Also, you need a tolerance
for the Victorian country life, since the basic impetus of the plot is that the narrator, Ned
Henry, is sent to 1888 to recuperate from the deleterious effects of too much time-travel.
Why the Victorian period, and why make him time-travel to get over time-travel? And why does
he need recuperation in the first place? Well, in 2057 a dragon woman by the
name of Lady Schrapnell has decided to rebuild old Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed
during World War II. (And she's rebuilding it in . . . Oxford. Naturally.) She's been
sending every available historian, and anybody else who doesn't run away fast enough, to the
far corners of history to check on details, and most particularly to find an atrocity known as
the bishop's bird stump. The only way to get Ned far enough away from her to actually rest is
to, well, send him to another century -- where he's supposed to fix an incongruity caused by
Verity, another historian, rescuing a drowning cat. Only now people in 1888 are falling in
love with the wrong individuals and not making trips they're supposed to make and oh crap Ned
and Verity need to get a brainless girl named Tossie to Coventry so she can see the bishop's
bird stump and have the life-changing experience that she wrote about in her diary thus
motivating her descendent Lady Schrapnell to rebuild Coventry Cathedral and setting all these
events in motion or THE ENTIRE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM WILL FALL APART.
I guessed some of where the plot was going (and then discovered I hadn't guessed far enough); other things managed to escape me entirely, to my delight. But this is the kind of story where guessing doesn't mess anything up; it's like watching an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption play out. I should have had the music from Clue playing while I read the end. I giggled out loud more times than I can count, and stayed up through much yawning because I was not going to bed until the book was done. Which is probably about the best recommendation one can give to any novel.