Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud
Dec. 9th, 2018 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: The Hippopotamus, by Stephen Fry
As they might say on Channel 4, this "contains scenes of a sexual nature from the start". I picked this up from a book-swap shelf, unaware of its film adaptation. The blurb says, "Ted Wallace is a sour, old, cantankerous beast, a womanising and whisky-sodden bounder of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too". Recently fired from his newspaper, Ted bumps into his goddaughter Jane in a pub. Jane has suffered from leukaemia, but believes herself to be cured, by unexplained forces at Swafford Hall in Norfolk, and she offers Ted a substantial sum of money to visit and investigate. Ted's adolescent godson, David, is in fact one of the family at Swafford Hall, and so he arranges to stay for a few weeks during the summer holidays.
Ted remains a sceptic of all that is going on, and spends time with David, his brother Simon, and other guests, under the ruse of compiling an autobiography of Lord Logan, the owner and Ted's childhood friend. I had not expected this to be a "country house mystery", but in many ways it is, although there's no murder and the mysterious goings-on relate to healing rather than harm. In other ways, it falls closer into the genre, with awkward family relations, other house guests, and staff, all with their own slightly concealed agendas. As one might expect, Fry's writing is wordy and entertaining, though also quite often filthy, and none of the characters are heroes, though they are not outright villains either. He manages to keep the sequence of absurd events rolling, before the quintessential final reveal over dinner. Scurrilous but amusing.
As they might say on Channel 4, this "contains scenes of a sexual nature from the start". I picked this up from a book-swap shelf, unaware of its film adaptation. The blurb says, "Ted Wallace is a sour, old, cantankerous beast, a womanising and whisky-sodden bounder of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too". Recently fired from his newspaper, Ted bumps into his goddaughter Jane in a pub. Jane has suffered from leukaemia, but believes herself to be cured, by unexplained forces at Swafford Hall in Norfolk, and she offers Ted a substantial sum of money to visit and investigate. Ted's adolescent godson, David, is in fact one of the family at Swafford Hall, and so he arranges to stay for a few weeks during the summer holidays.
Ted remains a sceptic of all that is going on, and spends time with David, his brother Simon, and other guests, under the ruse of compiling an autobiography of Lord Logan, the owner and Ted's childhood friend. I had not expected this to be a "country house mystery", but in many ways it is, although there's no murder and the mysterious goings-on relate to healing rather than harm. In other ways, it falls closer into the genre, with awkward family relations, other house guests, and staff, all with their own slightly concealed agendas. As one might expect, Fry's writing is wordy and entertaining, though also quite often filthy, and none of the characters are heroes, though they are not outright villains either. He manages to keep the sequence of absurd events rolling, before the quintessential final reveal over dinner. Scurrilous but amusing.