The first book I read in the New Year was To Say Nothing of the Dog. Actually, I read most of it in 2008, but finished it in 2009, and there is no truth to the idea that I deliberately held off finishing it on the 31st so that I wouldn’t have to write a Book Report to get caught up by midnight.
Actually, my Best Reader had brought the book on our Xmas visit to family-that-don’t-have-enough-books-in-the-house, and after I had finished the books that I had brought, we swapped. I don’t think I would have chosen to re-read it at this point, if I had been taking it off the shelf at home, but once started, I really enjoyed it. I don’t have any new insights into it, I’m afraid
Well, except for a plot point that bothered me this time, which somehow escaped my notice on previous rereads. Those who don’t remember the details of the book may want to leave off here… OK, so much of the frantic maneuvering in the second half of the book involves the desperate attempt to get Tossie together with the mysterious Mr. C; they know she is supposed to marry him, and that something happens between them on the day they go to Coventry Cathedral and see the bishop’s bird stump (which, oddly enough, seems to have been referred to as such in Tossie’s diary despite not gaining that sobriquet until a generation or more later). They don’t know Mr. C’s name, but they do know that they went to America, and that he acted in the new film industry, first in the silents and then in the talkies. There are attempts (in the home future) to decipher his name from the damaged diary, and there are attempts (in the Victorian past) to ascertain every nearby man’s last name.
Have you spotted it? Probably this is something that everybody spots the first time through the book, not the third, or that is notorious amongst people who actually speak to other people about specfic, but…
Why on earth don’t the future historians have a photograph of Mr. C? He had a whole career in movies, why don’t they just look up his face? Or if by the sort of coincidence that is the core of the book all the films in which he appeared have been destroyed, why not send Verity back to watch one in the nickelodeon? That’s the butler! she would say, and that would be the end of that.
Of course, the historians were all overwhelmed with the preparations for opening the Cathedral, and most of them were time-lagged as well. It’s not altogether surprising that nobody thought of it in time (although surely Lady Bracknell, er, Shrapnell would have watched her great-great-great-great grandfather’s movies, once she became obsessed with Tossie, an obsession that seems to have curiously failed to include gathering any reasonably available information about her or her spouse); it’s rather the sort of thing that somebody would have mentioned after the whole thing was over, and wossname and thingummy would slap their heads and say why didn’t we think of that?.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.