To Say Nothing of the Dog

I just finished To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. It's very light reading and a bit of a farce in the context of time travel. It's set in 2057 and the Victorian era mainly.

The story is about Ned Henry, who is a member of the time travel research group at Oxford in 2057. The group has been taken hostage by Lady Schrapnall, who wants to rebuild a cathedral what was bombed out in an air raid in 1940, and in exchange for a large donation, makes the researchers travel to various times to research the cathedral. One of the researchers in the Victorian era accidentally brings a live animal (a kitten) back to 2057, causing an incongruity in the time line. The gist of the story is repairing the time line.

One of the difficulties in the repair is time-lag. When a person travels in time, they have to readjust, until which time they act as though they are drunk. Ned is sent back to the Victorian era to take the kitten back to its owner, but he can't remember what he's bringing back or to whom or where.

Another difficulty is that it can be very difficult to send a person back in time without some "shift", meaning you can never be certain where or when they will actually arrive.

Ned meets the researcher who caused the incongruity, Verity, and promptly falls in love with her and vice versa. Being the Victorian era, it's all very chaste. There are fake seances, artful fainting, silly uneducated rich girls, reserved butlers, flappable maids, over-bearing matrons, and quite a bit of slapstick. There is also a mystery about a piece of art that disappeared from the cathedral called the bishop's bird stump. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it..