{"id":550,"date":"2007-10-05T08:43:02","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T08:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=550"},"modified":"2024-02-05T21:17:09","modified_gmt":"2024-02-06T02:17:09","slug":"willis_dog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2007\/10\/willis_dog\/","title":{"rendered":"Willis, Connie: To Say Nothing of the Dog<\/cite> (audio)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog<\/cite><\/strong> is a time-travel novel that pays tribute to, while gently poking fun at, Three Men in a Boat<\/cite><\/a> and Golden Age mysteries (Christie & Sayers particularly). I listened to the audiobook read by Steven Crossley.<\/p>\n

This book is a good example of why genre is important. The time travel in the beginning reminded me vaguely of Kage Baker’s Company series, and so I was expecting something sinister to be lurking the background—especially with the airy, implausible assertion that there was no profit in time travel because material objects couldn’t be brought out of their own times, and so it was left to the academics. (The Company’s strategy for exploiting the past, hiding away artifacts lost to history and then “rediscovering” them, would work just fine.) However, this is a comedy, so nothing sinister’s to be seen.<\/p>\n

Instead, To Say Nothing of the Dog<\/cite> is a long, amusing wander through Victorian England from the point of view of Ned Henry, a seriously time-lagged 21st-century Oxford historian who boats down the Thames with two men and a bulldog, and winds up at a country house trying to identify a mysterious Mr. C—in service of a mission that he can’t remember, but that may be vital to the outcome of World War II or, perhaps, to the preservation of the time-space continuum. At points I thought it might be a little too long for listening. For one thing, I figured out Ned’s mission well before he did; for another, the whole book is almost 21 hours, which is on the long side no matter what’s happening. However, the narrator does a nice job, and listening means I’m more likely to notice the jokes.<\/p>\n

Time travel stories tend not to be my thing: either they make my head hurt or they take a view of the universe I don’t care for. I could take or leave the time-travel plot here. However, I adore<\/strong> the conclusion of the country-house plot—I laughed and laughed when it was revealed—and that made the whole book worthwhile, for me. <\/p>\n

(A couple other minor infelicities about the audio version: every time the title is worked into the narration, it really stands out, and sometimes it feels forced. Also, I was deeply disappointed to find that “placet” is pronounced with an audible “t”; I didn’t take Latin and was mentally pronouncing it as though it were French, which sounds much more suited to romance. Not that this last is the book’s fault, of course.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog is a time-travel novel that pays tribute to, while gently poking fun at, Three Men in a Boat and Golden Age mysteries (Christie & Sayers particularly). I listened to the audiobook read by Steven Crossley. This book is a good example of why genre is important. The … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Willis, Connie: To Say Nothing of the Dog<\/cite> (audio)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,118],"tags":[442],"class_list":["post-550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sf-and-fantasy","category-single-narrator-audio","tag-willis-connie"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2781,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550\/revisions\/2781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}