Author:	Connie Willis
Copyright:	1998
Date Reviewed:	5/25/01
Rating:	8.5

Synopsis: Ned Henry works for the AFS, a time travel agency that studies history. His current mission is to find the original Bishop's Bird Stump, which was lost when Coventry Cathedral was bombed by the Nazis in November 1940. It is just one piece in a much larger project to rebuild the entire Cathedral in Oxford, with as many of the original elements as possible. Lady Shrapnell is running this project and is particularly interested in the Bishop's Bird Stump because it changed her great-great-great-great grandmother's life in 1888. Ned is also trying to figure out how the Bishop Bird Stump, an ugly flower urn, could have had such an impact.

During one drop, Ned meets Terrance and causes him to miss meeting the woman with whom he is to marry. This could have caused an incongruity. The time-space continuum has a way of correcting itself, but if the incongruity is too severe, history can be changed. Ned and Terrance meet Tossie, Lady Shrapnell's great-great-great-great grandmother, and Tossie and Terence become engaged. This causes another incongruity, since Tossie is supposed to marry Mr. C. Another time traveler, Verity, is staying with Tossie's family, pretending to be a distant cousin. She also caused an incongruity when she saved a cat from drowning and brought it forward through the Net to her own time. The Net is supposed to prevent any item from traveling forward in time except for dirt and harmless bacteria.

Meanwhile, the technicians at AFS are finding increased slippage on many drops which means that historians are not going back to the time and place they intended. This indicates that the Net is breaking down and history is changing in some radical way. The focus of the slippage is Coventry Cathedral in 1940. The allies had long cracked the Nazis Enigma code. When they determined the attack on Coventry would take place, they allowed it to happen so the Nazis wouldn't know that the code had been broken. If the Nazis knew this, they would have changed the code and may even have won the war.

For most of the novel, Ned and Verity tried to get Tossie to Coventry on a certain date so she will meet Mr. C. as she is supposed to, and go on with her life. The big surprise is that the Butler did it. He is the Mr. C. in Tossie's diary. The Butler, Bains (a name probably given to him by one of his masters) criticizes Tossie's admiration of the Bishop's Bird Stump in Coventry, and through later arguments, she realizes how spoiled she is and goes on to do great things. She and Bains get married and live happily ever after.

But that's not the real incongruity. When everyone went up to Coventry, the Reverend there flirted with Tossie in sight of his girlfriend Miss Sharpe, who stomped out. The Reverend runs after her, proposes on the spot, and they move away. If he had never met Tossie, they would never have been married, and Miss Sharpe would have stayed in Coventry, discovered that the Bishop's Bird Stump was missing (made of cast iron, it is indestructible and could not have been destroyed) and would have wrote a letter to the editor claiming that some one had had advanced knowledge of the raid. The article would have been forwarded to Germany by a Nazis spy, they would have changed the codes, and won the war.

Thanks to Verity's knowledge of 1930 mystery novels, Ned reasons that the Bishop's Bird Stump must have been removed by a renegade time traveler, and the only person who could have done that is Mrs. Bittner, the wife of the last Bishop of Coventry Cathedral. She removed the Bishop's Bird Stump and many other precious articles between the time the raid started and the time the roof collapsed. This opens up a whole new possibility of retrieving lost items just before they are destroyed. Like the books in the library at Alexandria. Ned also learns that the reason he and Verity were able to violate so many rules of the Net was because they were being manipulated by someone 600 years in the future.

Review: "To Say Nothing of the Dog" was billed as a funny comedy, though I was suspicions that one could keep my attention for nearly 500 pages. It did and then some. I giggled a few times, but appreciated most the complicated plot. It was well into the book that I realized it was being played out as a mystery novel, which is necessary complicated with many characters and plot twists. While the ending was a bit of a surprise, it was still in the realm of possibilities in this universe.

I had two minor problems with the book. First, the beginning was too much like the last book I read by this author, "Doomsday Book", but that one was very serious and for many pages I didn't see how this one stack up . Eventually, I did forget the prior book and was able to immerse myself in this one on its own merits. The greater problem was the whole subplot of who was Mr. C., which dragged out too long. We were given enough hints that it was obvious for a hundred pages before that the butler was really Mr. C. I look forward to reading other novels by Connie Willis.