To Say Nothing of the Dog

Ned Henry is suffering from advanced time lag, a condition brought on by too many jumps to the past in too few days, all of them in service of Lady Schrapnell, an American millionaire who has bullied Oxford's history faculty into rebuilding Coventry Cathedral exactly as it stood before the raid of 1940. One artefact remains missing: the bishop's bird stump, an object of such comprehensive ugliness that nobody can quite describe it. Ned is sent to Victorian England to recover, on the reasonable assumption that boating on the Thames in 1888 will do him no harm. He arrives too disoriented to remember his instructions, which is unfortunate, because a fellow historian has just brought something back through the net that should have remained in the past, and the continuum may be attempting to correct itself. Cats, séances, jumble sales, an appalling dog and several determined matchmakers ensue. Willis's homage to Jerome K. Jerome is a farce of the highest order, and beneath the comic machinery it argues, seriously, that history turns on trivialities and that nothing done out of love is ever quite wasted.