The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde

With his first book, The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde established himself as wonderfully adept at humorous fantasy of a literary bent. That novel introduced the character of literary detective Thursday Next, who has to solve a major crime: the kidnapping of Jane Eyre from her novel. It’s set in a marvelously literate world where much of the population is familiar with and devoted to literature, and where such marvelous things as nightly performances of Richard the Third (performed in the style of the Rocky Horror show) are a reality. Three more Thursday Next novels followed, all fun, though the world he’d created was starting to show some inconsistencies. But the combination of literary humor, out and out off-the-wall strangeness, and a plot interesting enough to hold the whole thing together were enough to make them a great deal of fun.

Fforde, though, decided to take a break from Thursday Next (though she’ll reportedly be back in 2007), to instead switch to a related world. In The Big Over Easy, he introduced inspector Jack Spratt of the Reading Nursery Crimes Division, who looks into crimes involved PDRs (persons of dubious reality – that is, fairy tale characters). The Big Over Easy was fun, though not as good as the Thursday Next books; while pretty good overall, it seemed to drag in spots. The Fourth Bear, the second Jack Spratt novel, though, is better, preserving all that was good in the previous book, but at the same time not feeling as flabby in parts.

The novel has several different things going on. As it starts, Spratt has been suspended due to problems in the resolution of the Little Red Riding Hood Caper (in which Red and Granny were eaten by the wolf and are now in need of extensive therapy – being swallowed alive does that to you) and for using children as bait to trap the Great Red-Legg’d Scissor-man (who cuts off the thumbs of children who such their thumbs). But at the same time, he’s needed more than ever. That homicidal maniac, the Gingerbreadman, has escaped from the insane asylum. Meanwhile, reporter “Goldilocks” Hatchett has disappeared and is later found dead after having visited the house of three bears.

Meanwhile, Jack’s domestic life is in chaos. His daughter is about to marry the titan Prometheus and is busy planning the wedding (should Zeus be invited?) Mr. Punch and his wife Judy have moved in next door, and their constant fighting makes it hard to get any piece. And his wife fines out that Jack himself is a PDR, and is very annoyed at his not telling her about it.

Take all this, combine it with exploding giant cucumbers, a theme park based on the World War I Battle of the Somme, a possibly dead scientist named McGuffin that everyone is chasing after, possible “porridge rings” selling illicit rolled oats to bears, and you get some idea of the wild insanity – and fun – of this novel.

And Fforde hasn’t abandoned the literary humor. One of my favorite scenes is when Jack and his wife attend a reception for a modern literary award:

“Jack, this is Marcus Sphincter, he’s one of the writers shortlisted for the prize this year.”

“That you, than you, thank you – most kind.”

“So what’s the title of this book you’ve written?”

“The terms ‘title,’ ‘book,’ and ‘written’ are so passé and 2004,’ announced Marcus airily, using his fingers in that annoying way that people do to signify quotation marks.

“It is 2004,” pointed out Jack.

“So early 2004,” said Marcus, hastily correcting himself. ‘Anyone can ‘write’ a ‘book,’ to raise my chosen art form to a higher plane I prefer to use the terms “designation,’ ‘codex’ and ‘composed.’

“Okay,” said Jack, “what’s the appellative of the tome you’ve created?”

“The what?”

“Hadn’t you hear?” asked Jack, hiding a smile and using that annoying finger-quotes thing back at Marcus, “’codex,’ ‘composed’ and ‘designation’ are out already; they were just too, too early evening.”

“They were?” asked Marcus, genuinely concerned.

The whole party sequence is a marvelous send-up of certain types of pretentiousness.

But the novel isn’t just humorous. It’s also rather exciting. It works both as a very humorous – at times, laugh-out-loud funny –novel and as a pretty good hard-boiled detective novel. There are some very thrilling sequences, and some page turning moments where you really worry a bit about the characters and what will happen to them. Spratt and his partners Mary Mary and Ashley (an alien) pursue a well thought out and suspenseful mystery, in which all the disparate elements are pulled together nicely in the end.

Jack, Mary, and Ashley will be coming back in The Last Great Tortoise Race – presumably in 2008, since The War of the Words (Thursday Next 5) is promised for 2007. I’m looking forward to it.