Humpty Dumpty: Criminal? Philanthropist? Manic-depressive? Womanizer? Whatever the case, clearly this is no bedtime story.
Humperdinck Jehoshaphat Aloysius Stuyvesant van Dumpty liked to sit on walls. Until one night, after a little too much to drink, he had a great fall. Or did he? At first all the signs to point to suicide, but for detectives Jack Spratt and Mary Mary of the Nursery Crimes Division, the evidence doesn’t add up. Too much of Humpty’s life is shrouded in mystery: the shady land deals in the former Soviet Union, the association with serial killer Giorgio Porgia, not to mention the shattered hearts of abandoned lovers and cuckolded husbands.
This isn’t Fairytale Land, this is Reading. An alternate-reality England where literature is the driving force of popular culture, and a detective’s worth is measured by how many copies of Amazing Crime Stories his exploits sell. Aliens, giants, and nursery rhyme characters work in your office, and Prometheus rents the room upstairs.
British novelist Jasper Fforde’s The Big Over Easy is the type of book that is difficult to do justice to. The wrong sort of description can easily make it seem too silly, too high-concept, or too surreal to ever work. You just have to trust that it does.
Certainly, it’s not for everyone. It’s science fiction, but reads like a 1950s pulp detective novel. The jokes range from foot fungus to the theft of the letter E, and almost every proper noun is some sort of a pun. The mystery itself does not carry the novel, so if clever references, brilliant wordplay, and a Douglas Adams-like penchant for paradox don’t light your literary fires, you can probably give this one a miss.
The real problem is, it’s hard to read The Big Over Easy without wanting very badly to compare it to Fforde’s brilliant Thursday Next series, which started with The Eyre Affair. Over Easy is technically a stand-alone novel, as it does not require any previous knowledge to understand or enjoy it. But through clever links and references, it is firmly entrenched in the Next mythology. As a result, its predecessors loom menacingly, and it would take a truly extraordinary work to get out from under that shadow.
Over Easy is not quite that book. It lacks the spark of The Eyre Affair-its world is not as rich and developed, and it seems to add increasingly bizarre plot elements to generate momentum. In addition, it’s also missing the delightfully nerdy historical and literary references of The Eyre Affair, which puts good use to otherwise pointless arts and science degrees.
Regardless, The Big Over Easy is still thoroughly enjoyable, and will introduce readers to a whole new world of the fantastic. It’s the perfect thing to pick up before the workload gets too heavy, and we all head into a not-so-great fall (pun intended).
