Booklog 20/26: J.C. Williams: A Reluctant Christmas Novel – Audiobook

Audiobook narrated by Chris Devon.

Adam Catchpole is a science fiction author whose book sales are slipping. He’s in financial difficulties and spiralling into depression. His agent suggests writing in a different genre, and the popular market trends are spicy romances and Christmas stories. Though he hates Christmas, he reluctantly starts a novel. An odd incident involving a dance and drama school, sets him off reconnecting with the world and he find that as soon as he opens himself up to new experiences and new people, he starts to rebuild himself. There’s also a childhood backstory which reveals why Adam hates Christmas. His own story is that of a Christmas novel – slightly schmaltzy and feel-good. A cosy story, if you’re in the mood. Chris Devon reads it very well. I’m not sure if his accent is Manx (which is where the book is set) but it’s definitely an accent, and the book is all the better for it.

Booklog 21/26: Connie Willis: To Say Nothing of the Dog – Oxford Time Travel #3

Audiobook narrated by Steven Crossley

The first Oxford Time Travel book is a collection of short stories, the second is Doomsday Book, read and reviewed earlier this month. This is the third which I was persuaded to try because (unlike Doomsday) it’s supposedly light and frothy, and it also won the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1999. And indeed it has elements of Three Men in a Boat meets Dr Who. Ned Henry, one of Oxford’s time-travelling historians, is searching for the Bishop’s Bird Stump, a (fictional) vase lost in the wartime bombing of Coventry Cathedral, in order to please Lady Schrapnell who holds the purse strings of the project to rebuild the cathedral. He’s been sent hither and thither to jumble sales and air-raids that he’s impossibly time-lagged and brain-fogged, so to get him safely out of the way his professor (Dunworthy whom we met in Doomsday Book) sends him back to Oxford 1888 for a relaxing fortnight beside the River Thames. He goes through the veil somewhat precipitously to get away from Lady Schrapnell, ill-prepared and barely taking in his instructions. Thus he makes a mess of his first encounter, fails to do something important and ends up on the river with an Oxford undergrad, Terence St Trewes, and a dotty history professor. Eventually he manages to meet up with his contact (the lovely Verity) and ends up a guest in a country house belonging to a bunch of Lady Schrapnell’s great-great-many-times-great-grands with the beautiful but vapid Tossie who speaks in diddums-diddums baby talk, her goldfish-fancying father and a scarily Schrapnell-like mother, plus the family butler, the Jeeves-like Baine. Thus the romantic comedy is set as Ned and Verity try to put right a variance in the space-time continuum which they accidentally caused in the first place. The Bishop’s Bird Stump is constantly bubbling away in the background as it’s a pivotal object that changes Tossie’s life. The book is light, but not a comedy in the laugh-out-loud sense, more slightly quirky and absurdist. Yes, there’s a dog (Cyril the bulldog) and a goldfish-eating cat (Princess Arjumand). Steven Crossley reads it well in an RP accent, with a good range of voices. You’re never far from hearing Lady Bracknell in a raft of imperious women from the book’s present (2057)  to Victorian England. And, of course, all is well in the end with the bird stump found, and the right lovers paired up, more thanks to time itself than the hapless Ned. Connie Willis captures the Three-Men-in-a-Boat vibe very well