To say nothing of the dog - reading_fox's review
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1reading_fox
to say nothing of the dog
my review:
Dull. Drags throughout, with the increased boredom of the victorian era, and a hopelessly unresolved paradoxical timetravel plot. I think it's supposed to be funny. It isn't.
The year is somewhen in the future. And a woman with a silly name has risen to a position of influence and decided that all resources must be used to rebuild the Nazi bombed Coventry cathedral in all it's glory. This requires the 'historians' to travel back in time through the 'net' to establish exactly - god is in the details - how it looked back then. And for some reason nobody can get into the cathedral or even Coventry at the time of the raid to determin if a hideous statue called the Bishop's Bird Stump is actually there. Hence the researchers are sent to various other times to try and determine the answer from other evidence. This results in our heroine Verity rescuing a cat in the victorean era, and our hero being sent back there to replace it. Confused? So you should be. The remaining 300 pages are a Victorean 'comedy' of manners as Ned tries to cope with Victorian society and ensure everything happens as it's supposed to. Bizarrely, the ending suddenly turns into a 30s mystery novel.
The characters are thin, 1D cutouts with no complexity, no ulterior motives (or any motives), and dull, except from the very few occasions when they're mindlessly overexaggerated. The plot doesn't make sense, no effort is made to explain the science, or the deviations, logical consequences or paradoxes. There's lots of tedious exposition about various historical events, and the significance or otherwise of them - and then plenty of statements that they couldn't have been changed anyway. So who cares? It doesn't work on many levels.
The prose is fairly light, but overly descriptive at times. It fails to capture any tension, even in the middle of an air raid. There's no romantic interest until everyone collapses in each others' arms. Perhaps the dog is the most sympathetic character in it, and he does nothing but drool. Even worse the formatting emulates the victorean gothic novels with themed chapter headings. A style that just ought to have died out long ago: if I want to know what happens, I'll read the actual words. Although the book is so badly written in places that I was tempted to just read the headings and skip the words.
Don't bother reading this, and I'm unlikely to read any of the author's other works. It was that bad.
Comments welcome
my review:
Dull. Drags throughout, with the increased boredom of the victorian era, and a hopelessly unresolved paradoxical timetravel plot. I think it's supposed to be funny. It isn't.
The year is somewhen in the future. And a woman with a silly name has risen to a position of influence and decided that all resources must be used to rebuild the Nazi bombed Coventry cathedral in all it's glory. This requires the 'historians' to travel back in time through the 'net' to establish exactly - god is in the details - how it looked back then. And for some reason nobody can get into the cathedral or even Coventry at the time of the raid to determin if a hideous statue called the Bishop's Bird Stump is actually there. Hence the researchers are sent to various other times to try and determine the answer from other evidence. This results in our heroine Verity rescuing a cat in the victorean era, and our hero being sent back there to replace it. Confused? So you should be. The remaining 300 pages are a Victorean 'comedy' of manners as Ned tries to cope with Victorian society and ensure everything happens as it's supposed to. Bizarrely, the ending suddenly turns into a 30s mystery novel.
The characters are thin, 1D cutouts with no complexity, no ulterior motives (or any motives), and dull, except from the very few occasions when they're mindlessly overexaggerated. The plot doesn't make sense, no effort is made to explain the science, or the deviations, logical consequences or paradoxes. There's lots of tedious exposition about various historical events, and the significance or otherwise of them - and then plenty of statements that they couldn't have been changed anyway. So who cares? It doesn't work on many levels.
The prose is fairly light, but overly descriptive at times. It fails to capture any tension, even in the middle of an air raid. There's no romantic interest until everyone collapses in each others' arms. Perhaps the dog is the most sympathetic character in it, and he does nothing but drool. Even worse the formatting emulates the victorean gothic novels with themed chapter headings. A style that just ought to have died out long ago: if I want to know what happens, I'll read the actual words. Although the book is so badly written in places that I was tempted to just read the headings and skip the words.
Don't bother reading this, and I'm unlikely to read any of the author's other works. It was that bad.
Comments welcome
