BOOK - "The Fourth Bear"

For the last five years, Jasper Fforde has made a living riffing on literary genres: his Thursday Next novels are detective novels that investigate from within other classic novels (like Jane Eyre), and his most recent series, of which The Fourth Bear is the latest, reinvents Jack “ate no fat” Sprat as a hard-boiled detective who runs the Nursery Crime Division. Like Douglas Adams for sci-fi and Terry Pratchett for fantasy, Fforde has a way of filling the page with clever references and perversions of the themes we grew up with, and he’s got a genuine penchant for humor. However, The Fourth Bear is an inconsistent novel, too long by half, kept aloft by so many hurtful puns and repetitive jokes that it winds up sounding like Piers Anthony: it degenerates into making fun of itself with metajokes which—by their nature—are not nearly as clever as they proclaim themselves to be.

This is not to say that Fforde isn’t inventive: the plot here involves cuclear energy made from genetically modified prize-winning cucumbers, a McGuffin (literally), and a Ginza assassin who happens to be a seven-foot tall cake (or cookie) known more familiarly as The Gingerbreadman. But when the characters continually refer to the type of plot device they’re going to use next (“So you’re suggesting we look for him against orders, catch him, cover ourselves with glory, and the by-the-book officers look like idiots?”), the charming wit starts to erode. And it only gets worse as the book goes on: Ashley, an alien who works for the NCP (Nursery Crime Police), never misses an opportunity to make a joke in binary (his native language), and the only thing repeated more often than these jokes are accounts of the plot (which is not nearly that convoluted).

Another flaw of The Fourth Bear is that Fforde has more or less squandered his characters to churn out more of the same. Detective Mary Mary goes on a date with Ashley, and it’s one of the more charming moments in the novel—I wish there were more like it; the book wouldn’t seem nearly as cheap. The best resolution in the novel is Jack Spratt’s confession to his wife that he is a PDR (Person of Dubious Reality), but the aftermath of that is glossed right over, solved by Punch and Judy’s intermediation. And the new characters we do meet—Caliban, Dorian Grey, David Copperfield—are completely subsumed by the plot: they exist merely to add subplots or, worse, contextual jokes. This is fine for the short term, but when you build a book entirely around context, it leaves the majority of the work to the reader.

What we’re left with are jokes that strain connections and wangle words to make us laugh. When they arrest the Red-Legg’d Scissor-man at the beginning of the novel, Fforde makes sure to have him cut himself so that Jack can make the “apt” comment that he’s been “nicked.” (Fforde is a distinctly British author—his colloquial writing is more charming than confusing, but there you have it.) Occasionally, Fforde manages to make a joke resonate with the plot, such as the brilliant “right to arm bears” controversy, but more likely, something like this: fellow officer Pippa (who is glossed over completely in this installment) is pregnant. But not just pregnant, pregnant by Peck. And not just Peck, but Peck “with the pockmarked face and the twin over in Palmer Park.” See where this is going?

“Paul Peck is the Palmer Park Peck; Peter Peck is the pockmarked peck from Pembroke Park. Pillocks. I’d placed a pound in Pippa Piper picking PC Percy Procter from Pocklington."
There was a pause.
"It seems a very laborious setup for a pretty lame joke, doesn’t it?" mused Jack.
"Yes," agreed Mary, shaking her head sadly. "I really don’t know how he gets away with it.”

He gets away with it because he’s Jasper Fforde, an author with a huge fanbase that will continue to read him without holding him to any standards. And while there are other fairy tale riffs out there (like Fables, a darker, comic-book approach), Fforde is the only funny one: funny Fforde freely fields and fulfills his fiction fans by focusing on family fables. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it—but don’t let it run down either.