Althea Ann's Reviews > To Say Nothing of the Dog

This book was a real stand-out for me! I picked it up after reading some good reviews, and I was pleasantly surprised to like it even better than I expected.
It's a time-travel/mystery/romance which is consistently witty and often downright hilarious. Books which are simultaneously literary and humorous are hard to come by - but here, Willis succeeds amazingly well.
In the near future, time travel has been discovered. It's being used by a wealthy society dame, Lady Schrapnell, in her well-funded pet project - to restore Coventry Cathedral, destryed in a WWII bombing raid. Her time-travelling agents live in fear of her harridan-like ways, especially Ned Henry, who's been assigned to ascertain exactly what happened to the Bishop's Bird Stump (a particularly grotesque and rococo piece of Victorian art).
Indirectly, this assignment takes him to Victorian England, where, affected by severe time-lag (think jet-lag x10) he ends up travelling down the river in the company of a recently-lovestruck young man - and a boisterous dog. The action picks up from there, with a cast of quirky characters, including the ditzy blonde Tossie, the pre-raphaelite beauty Verity, eccentric professors, prudish-and-proper parents, fraudulent psychics, and, of course, Princess Arjumand.
I haven't read "Three Men in a Boat, to Say Nothing of the Dog!" by Jerome K. Jerome - a genuine Victorian comedy that apparently inspired Willis stylistically - but I can say that this book would definitely appeal to any fans of Victorian fiction (experts in the field would, I'm sure, 'get' many things that I missed), as well as classic mystery fans (Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie are referenced more than once), and, of course, sci-fi/time travel aficionados.

(I just noticed that I should probably note here, that after writing this (some time ago) I did get myself over to the library to read 'Three Men in A Boat': https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)