Sharon's Reviews > To Say Nothing of the Dog

First read several years ago, but couldn't remember much about it other than that it involved time travel to the late 19th century and was quite funny. I wanted something light after Doomsday Book and as a kind of last holiday hurrah before resuming teaching and researching duties, and this book totally fit the bill!

A fantastic, lighthearted, pretty-much-perfect book that hit a bunch of my bulletproof favorite narrative tropes. To Say Nothing of the Dog is as jolly, funny, and feel-good as Doomsday Book was serious and dark. One gets the sense that Willis just had a rollicking good time writing this book.TSNotD is much more interested in a tongue-in-cheek depiction of history, unlike Doomsday Book's meticulous realism. There are the stock characters of absentminded academic, frivolous debutante, supercilious butler, and so forth, but they feel like a kind of tribute to the Victorian comedy of manners rather than lazy writing. The mystery/adventure aspect of the plot is well fleshed out and sustains its momentum throughout with a really lovely pay-off at the end (the kind that heightens the pleasure of reading and rereading, rather than making the latter feel pointless). Throw in an abundance of literary allusions (particularly to famous detective fiction), a delightful bulldog, and an irascible cat, and I was in heaven! It was nice to see recurring characters (Mr. Dunworthy, Finch, mention of Badri) from Doomsday Book (though I wondered what happened to poor Kivrin and why she wasn't featured or at least mentioned) and a lot of the worldbuilding for the mid-21st century that was missing in DB gets fleshed out here. (For example, we learn that cats have become extinct in the 2060s).

Verdict: A new favorite comfort read!