The Fourth Bear - by Jasper Fforde
Even though the Nursery Crimes series will never be as good as the Thursday Next series, it’s still a breakthrough in the literary world. Jasper Fforde’s books are like the book about all books. He combines legendary characters from well-known literature and weaves a seamless, tautly plotted story. In the Nursery Crimes series, as the title suggests, he puts together various nursery rhymes characters, but he also gives them a background.
For example, Humpty Dumpty isn’t just this egg that fell from the wall and caused all that turmoil, he supposedly is Jewish (and extremely wealthy) with this super long name and is quite the lady’s man. Even more shocking would be the Gingerbread man, who’s a running, murdering 7 foot tall biscuit/cake that is a serial murderer with a victim count totalling 112.
‘The Fourth Bear’ brings Jack Spratt (who could eat no fat) and Mary Mary (quite contrary) into a plot that entwines the Three Bears living in Andersen’s Wood, Goldilocks (of course), and sundry other characters like Caliban (Tempest), Punch & Judy (marriage counsellors, hahaha…) and Dorian Grey (and how he modified Jack’s Allegro!).
In this series, they’re investigating the murder of Goldilocks, who ‘ran away from the cottage and was never seen again’, and they uncover a conspiracy involving cucumbers that undergo fission releasing nuclear blasts when they reach 50kilos, the illegal trade of porridge, honey and oats in the black market by bears… And then, all’s revealed with the fourth bear! Haha, I shall not say more because I can almost hear the gritting of EW’s teeth and the sheer irritation of finding out the end of the story even before she’s laid her hands on that book! hahaha…
Ok, blogging about this book doesn’t do it justice, you’ve got to read it!
Look out for Thursday Next in the next installment of the series, ‘The War of the Words’ (July 2007), and Ashley, Jack and Mary will be back in ‘The Last Great Tortoise Race’!
