SOMETHING ROTTEN
by Jasper Fforde
Hodder £12.99 pp393
To read one book in which a protagonist is almost murdered by steamroller may be regarded as unusual. To read another straight afterwards seems unfortunate. The coincidence is indicative of a minor outbreak of “postmodern”hilarity. For neither Anthony Horowitz nor Jasper Fforde plays their potential squashed-hero moments as straight slapstick. Horowitz’s novel takes a simple, nearly absurd “what if” and allows the answer to unfold more or less logically, gathering laughs as it speeds away from reality. Fforde has been asking dozens of “what ifs?” for some time, and the answers are contained in his cultishly popular Thursday Next series, of which Something Rotten is the fourth.
The Killing Joke is the story of a quest, in which the Grail is the answer to the question “where do jokes come from?”. Guy Fletcher hears a sick joke about a dead actress, and decides to trace its origin. Any doubts about the likelihood of someone pursuing such a quest are dispelled by the information that the actress was Guy’s biological mother, who gave him up for adoption, and that Guy is an actor, so has nothing better to do. Initially, the novel threatens to plod as doggedly as its hero, as Guy traces the joke back, person by person. He is helped by the fact that nobody seems to have used e-mail or the telephone to tell the joke, so the distances he has to travel are fairly manageable. But Horowitz changes gear when Guy starts to make some progress, and the book rapidly takes on the characteristics of a surreal paranoid thriller, in which the joke-originating organisation tries to stop our hero by any means, as long as they are silly. This is where the steamroller comes in. Guy trips into its path on (you guessed it) a banana skin, which has been dropped by one of a recognisable trio of an Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman. Later he is chased by nuns, rabbis and a host of other “racial and sexual stereotypes”.
Horowitz gets some laughs by sheer accumulation of absurdities. But in other ways, this is a rather depressing book, in which a mean society has even outsourced its most democratic brand of humour. It is also a book whose various premises don’t bear too close scrutiny. Why, for example, does a ruthless joke-creating organisation need to send embodiments of jokes to kill someone who threatens to unmask it? Ruthless industrialists protecting a patent for a new vacuum cleaner wouldn’t attack their enemies with vacuum cleaners. One answer is “because it’s funny”. Another is “otherwise, the author wouldn’t have a book”.
The mildly surreal episodes in Horowitz are as nothing compared to the host of alternative realities dreamt up by Jasper Fforde. Straying into Something Rotten is like walking into a Star Trek convention or a religious ceremony. Unless you surrender yourself, you’re going to have a very bad time indeed. Fforde’s numerous fans will only need to be told that this is the new novel. For non-initiates: Thursday Next is a “Literary Detective” who tidies up anomalies in fiction, and is based in an alternative Swindon in a parallel universe, where characters from fiction and history are as likely to pop up as characters from Fforde’s sadly pun-saturated imagination (Landen Park Laine, Brik Schitt-Hawse, that sort of thing). There are lots of good things here (anyone for high-speed contact croquet, in which the referee is dressed as a vicar?) but, again, it doesn’t pay to ask too many questions, such as why should a cloned Shakespeare born in the early 20th century speak Elizabethan English. As with Horowitz, the answer is “because the plot says so”.
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And the steamroller? It’s driven by a disguised minotaur, called Norman.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £8.49 plus 99p p&p and £10.39 (Fforde) plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy