Denver Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club

Ned Henry is a suffering from advanced time-lag, and it's impairing his logic.  He's made fourteen drops in a week for Lady Schrapnell and her Coventry Cathedral project.  So Ned is sent by Mr. Dunworthy to Victorian England in 1888 for some rest.  He knows he's to fix a time incongruity when he's there, but he can't recall what he's supposed to do.

After arriving in Oxford face down on the railway tracks, Ned meets Terence St. Trewes.  Terence isn't his contact but he's going in the right direction, so Ned joins Terence and his bulldog Cyril on a boating trip down the Thames.

Upon a bridge Terence spots Miss Tossie Mering.  Terence was helping Tossie search for her lost cat Princess Arjumund.  With Tossie is Miss Brown, who is Ned's contact, Verity Kindle.  They all end up at the Mering's house at Muchings End.

Time travellers Ned and Verity soon learn that the time incongruity is more convoluted than they, or those back in Oxford, ever imagined.

This is amusing throughout, and hilarious on at least two occasions: early on, when Willis disguises her canine characters - the same way Jerome K. Jerome did in Three Men in a Boat - and introduces the very funny symptoms of timelag, and later when Baines gives his opinion of the bishop's bird stump.  The romance between Ned and Verity is nicely handled, although not a major emphasis through most of the story.  You have to recommend any book as fun to read as this one.

Still, the real focus of the story, fixing the time incongruity, didn't work for me that well.  For half the book, Ned is worried about getting the cat back to Muchings End.  Why?  As far as he knows, the cat was supposed to have died already!  At this stage in the development of SF, it's very difficult to construct a compelling time paradox story.  Willis was just a little too distracted with her tributes to Jerome, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Sayers, etc. to pull it off.