A delightful, comic time travel extravaganza

It's definitely a love-hate thing I have with Connie Willis. The inimitable style of this Queen of the Non Sequiturs is vividly on display in To Say Nothing of the Dog, a Hugo Award-winning time travel saga brimming with seemingly random irrelevancies and interruptions that is apt to drive the simple-minded linear-thinking reader (me) to distraction.

Willis turns out to be in her element in the Victorian period (turn-of-the-century England), describing the bric-a-brac-happy living rooms of the time with a fondness that undoubtedly helps explain why her own books are so enthusiastically cluttered.

But of course, To Say Nothing of the Dog is more, bounding from the mid-21st century to 1940, 1395, and a handful of other space-time venues in a fantastically intricate design that resembles not only Willis's style, but the chaotic and interconnected nature of history and the universe. Perhaps that is The Answer: the universe is actually a very, very large Victorian living room.

The protagonist here is Ned Henry, a British time-travel researcher in around 2050 who is bulldozed by one Lady Schrapnell (an obvious takeoff on the Lady Bracknell of Oscar Wilde's famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest) into hunting down the "bishop's bird stump," a notable urn that has not been seen since the bombing of Coventry Cathedral by the Germans in 1940. Lady Schrapnell desires to locate the bird stump so that it can be restored to the cathedral as part of a major renovation effort, but in a brief respite from his mission, Henry becomes embroiled in what appears to be a potential paradox--a rip in the fabric of the past--in the Victorian era and must essay a repair.

I come to Dog fairly fresh from Willis's Bellwether, a shorter and earlier novel that bears a striking resemblance. In Bellwether the subject was fads, where they come from and whither they go, and Willis's command of the subject matter was masterful. Here, she shows a similarly daunting familiarity with history, tossing off dozens of embryonic alternate-history tales as asides to her plot. As Henry presses desperately ahead seeking to glue together what appears to be an irreparably broken sequence of events, he ruminates about all the other trivial occurrences of history that have turned out to have disproportionate consequences--Hitler's headache on D-Day, King John's decision to travel to Oxford (where he was dragooned into signing the Magna Carta), and many more. In between, Willis provides detailed discussions of the main locales of her story that show the same diligent research, while the babbling conversation of her characters flows in an unceasing torrent. Oh, and did I mention? One of them speaks almost exclusively in literary allusions. "O brave new world, that has such people in't."

It's all too much, or would be, were it not that Willis is an expert and extraordinarily witty writer. The writing here is often superb, the sort that looks simple and effortless until you try it yourself and discover that it is the result of long and patient practice. And if you enjoy understated witticisms of the British variety, she will probably have you in stitches much of the time.

The writing is excellent, the characters carefully and credibly drawn, and the texture of the settings, as the foregoing suggests, remarkably tangible. Dog taxed my patience at times, but in the end, I enjoyed it immensely. If you are at all intrigued by alternate history or time travel, this is one you won't want to miss.

Writing: 9
Characterization: 9
Big Issues/Ideas: 8

Recommended reading for those who enjoy To Say Nothing of the Dog: Willis's Bellwether and Doomsday Book, a much darker time travel adventure during the year of the Black Death; and Harry Turtledove's entertaining alternate-history novels, in particular The Guns of the South (Lee's army equipped with AK-47s, no less) and How Few Remain (the story of a second Civil War).