Most of the last weekend, I spent reading books in my bed. My latest acquisition is a hardbound by Jasper Fforde. Now, I first encountered this author in Rhys's posession, in a book called the The Eyre Affair and was basically recommended with 'It's absolutely crazy'. And it turned out to be exactly that, surreal to the extreme though you are left with a lingering doubt whether all this could really happen. There is just enough reality mixed in to make you wonder, just like the time you saw The Truman Show. The current tome under inspection is titled The Big Over Easy which does nothing to diminish my opinion.
The book tries to transcend reality by introducing nursery rhyme characters including the anthropomorphic animals and the usual fare of animated pastries, girls with 28 feet of hair and Solomon Grundy as an old man. But the beginning of the book starts with a trial of Three Little Pigs for pre-meditated murder of one Mr Wolff. The case hinged around the fact that the pot of water into which the 'Big Bad Wolf' fell in would have taken six hours to reach boiling which indicated premeditation. Since the pigs were tried by a jury of peers, that is a baker's dozen of pigs, they walked scot free. Then there are the detectives whose guild treats public approval as its currency and traces its history back to Sherlock Holmes (as if he's real). Each guild detective has an assigned Official Sidekick whose duties include writing out a passable entry for the mystery hungry magazines. So there's the grungy and bitter man stuck in a rut - Jack Spratt and the ambitious career detective Friedland Chymes. Both of whom started from the same humble beginning of the Nursery Crimes Division, but while Friedland was ranked #2 in popularity, Spratt wasn't even on the list.
And then the case comes up even more nuttier than a christmas fruit cake. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, but was he pushed ? Well, as it turns out his ex-wife shot someone else thinking it was Humpty, his current lover put poison in his coffee, his previous flame's (who happened to be Rapunzel) husband ordered him killed and then there was the part about him hatching. Anyway, we ended up with a conniving chiropodist, a golden goose, a geek who's obsessed with spelling (re: Unsfzpxkable) , an alien who loves filing and then there's the Jellyman. Not to mention that Jack has killed 4 giants before and cuts down a beanstalk to kill the monster.
The first thought to enter my head at the end of the book was What was this guy smoking ?.
--Humpty Dumpty didn't fall, he was pushed.