The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde (Viking, 2020)
I’m a Jasper Fforde fan from way back. I own his entire Thursday Next series, his Nursery Crime books, and his Dragonslayer series for kids. My friend Kim and I once stood in line for hours at Politics & Prose in D.C. to meet Fforde and get his autograph. In short, I think the man’s a terrific writer.
All that said, I’m afraid that a couple of his recent standalone books haven’t quite been up to par. One thing Fforde is known for is his ability to imagine and describe complex imaginary worlds, but in Early Riser (2018), the worldbuilding gets so exceedingly elaborate that it nearly strangles the life out of the story.
Something similar happens in Fforde’s latest standalone novel, The Constant Rabbit. Here, Fforde gives us a world where a mysterious occurrence, known as the Event, has turned rabbits and a few other species into human-sized, thinking, talking creatures. It’s an intriguing premise—but we have to wait a bit to get to it, because the story actually opens with a different weird event called Speed Librarying in which all the participants borrow the names of British prime ministers. This event is only there to introduce the female (rabbit) protagonist to the male (human) protagonist, it isn’t fully explained, and it’s hardly ever mentioned again, yet Fforde lavishes a wealth of detail on it.
That’s emblematic of one of the general problems with the book: too much overthinking, overdescribing, and overexplaining. Even some of the jokes are overexplained, which of course is fatal. For instance, we get “It was one of those hard stares, the sort a hungry spaniel might use to bore holes in a fridge once known to have contained a single sausage,” which is almost worthy of P.G. Wodehouse. But then we get a footnote adding, “If you’ve ever owned a spaniel, you’ll know exactly what this looks like.” Wodehouse would never.
(Another favorite writer of mine, Robin McKinley, unfortunately ran into this same problem with overwriting in her last few books, and also on her blog, where the footnotes had footnotes of their own. I wonder if there’s something about being a brilliant and successful novelist that tends to loosen one’s restraint after a while.)
Anyway, the other problem with The Constant Rabbit is this: There’s nothing at all subtle or inventive about the satire. The situation with the humanized rabbits trying to live among actual humans offers a golden opportunity to mock the bigotry of those who insist on pushing out anyone at all different from them. Obviously, bigotry needs all the mocking it can get, and the Fforde of the Thursday Next days would be the ideal person to do it.
But here, Fforde has his characters making speeches and taking actions that are exactly like the speeches and actions of real-life bigots, with the one slight difference that rabbits are on the receiving end instead of, say, minorities or immigrants. As creative as he gets with the worldbuilding, he doesn’t get very creative with this part at all. Fforde has a keen understanding of how bigots twist reality to justify the most heinous attitudes and acts, but when he tries to bring this understanding into his fantasy world, something just doesn’t work.
Part of the problem, I think, stems from the moral cowardice of our narrator, Peter Knox. Knox likes the rabbits, and he dislikes the bigots, but he works in “Rabbit Compliance” anyway, frequently telling us that he has to keep the job to support his daughter (what, there are no other jobs available anywhere?). Peter drifts along through the first two thirds of the book in this divided state, being satirical about the anti-rabbit forces but not having much standing to do so, since they sign his paycheck. But when the truth about his job starts coming out to his rabbit friends (mild spoiler alert), he finds that they already knew and they still think he’s a good person who just needs a little help bringing out his inner goodness.
As character development, this sort of thing has all the impact of a dud firecracker. In fact, the rabbits’ comprehensive knowledge of the enemy forces and ability to stay way ahead of them makes sense within the story, and gives them a lot of agency and appeal (the kind that our drifting narrator doesn’t have), but at the same time it lowers the stakes and dissipates the tension.
I don’t mean to be hard on Fforde, honestly. I just get frustrated, because I know he’s better than this. I may not be able to give The Constant Rabbit a rousing recommendation, but I’ll keep recommending the Thursday Next and Dragonslayer books, and hoping that one day he’ll rise to those heights again.
(Image copyright Viking)
Book Links
The Constant Rabbit on Amazon
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I’m back on the Commentarians podcast with Joe Zaragoza, this time watching and discussing the immortal film Casablanca!
I hope all you dads out there had a great Father’s Day. Since the Fourth of July is two weeks from today and I’m taking a short “staycation” around then, I’m going to skip publishing the newsletter on that day. Enjoy the holiday, and I’ll be back on July 11!
I hate it when authors forget storytelling and step onto their soapbox of whatever stripe. Same thing happened to Michael Creighton in his novel about climate change. I agreed with his take, but his story was boring. No subtlety at all. I thought I was reading a OPED instead of a story.