Take a big pot and throw in a murder mystery or two, add as many nursery rhymes as you can remember, simmer over a low heat for a few hours and serve. What you end up with might be something similar to The Big Over Easy.
This is fairly typical Jasper Fforde fair; clever, witty spoof that makes for easy reading; the comedy more of the wry chuckle nature rather than laugh out loud; not quite as challenging as his Thursday Next books as most of us are likely to be more familiar with nursery rhymes than all the literary references in those books but, for me, not quite as much fun either.
Fforde does shuffle his nursery rhymes a little which I found a touch confusing at times. For example one of the main characters, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt (he of the reluctance to eat fat) of the Reading Nursery Crime Division, has acquired a reputation for giant killing and finds himself strangely drawn to climb a giant beanstalk growing in his mother’s back garden. So don’t necessarily expect too slavish an adherence to the details of your favourite rhymes. But there’s plenty of fun to be had in a world where the characters from Nursery rhymes, both of the human and anthropomorphised animal variety, share this world with the rest of humanity.
I may be reading too much into it but I also get the feeling that Fforde is having a none too gentle dig at the modern world of media and celebrity where a good story is far more important than a slavish worship of veracity, which is probably not a very Good Thing when applied to criminal investigations:
“I read your account of the Shakespeare fight-rigging caper,” said the one named Hoorn. “I thought it impressive. The pace was good, you built the tension early, and you managed to keep it sustained throughout the story.” He shook her hand and added, by way of an afterthought, “And the police investigation itself was quite good, too—although if I’d been Flowwe, I would have let one member of the gang escape to add a small amount of tension to a recapture. You could have stretched the headlines over another two days.”
A fun tribute to the absurd, The Big Over Easy is an enjoyable light read but for me not quite as good as The Eyre Affair. However it’s nice to find a book that points out the ridiculous number of murders that seem to take place in certain sleepy Oxfordshire backwaters and other similar places.
This is fairly typical Jasper Fforde fair; clever, witty spoof that makes for easy reading; the comedy more of the wry chuckle nature rather than laugh out loud; not quite as challenging as his Thursday Next books as most of us are likely to be more familiar with nursery rhymes than all the literary references in those books but, for me, not quite as much fun either.
Fforde does shuffle his nursery rhymes a little which I found a touch confusing at times. For example one of the main characters, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt (he of the reluctance to eat fat) of the Reading Nursery Crime Division, has acquired a reputation for giant killing and finds himself strangely drawn to climb a giant beanstalk growing in his mother’s back garden. So don’t necessarily expect too slavish an adherence to the details of your favourite rhymes. But there’s plenty of fun to be had in a world where the characters from Nursery rhymes, both of the human and anthropomorphised animal variety, share this world with the rest of humanity.
I may be reading too much into it but I also get the feeling that Fforde is having a none too gentle dig at the modern world of media and celebrity where a good story is far more important than a slavish worship of veracity, which is probably not a very Good Thing when applied to criminal investigations:
“I read your account of the Shakespeare fight-rigging caper,” said the one named Hoorn. “I thought it impressive. The pace was good, you built the tension early, and you managed to keep it sustained throughout the story.” He shook her hand and added, by way of an afterthought, “And the police investigation itself was quite good, too—although if I’d been Flowwe, I would have let one member of the gang escape to add a small amount of tension to a recapture. You could have stretched the headlines over another two days.”
A fun tribute to the absurd, The Big Over Easy is an enjoyable light read but for me not quite as good as The Eyre Affair. However it’s nice to find a book that points out the ridiculous number of murders that seem to take place in certain sleepy Oxfordshire backwaters and other similar places.
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