THE CONSTANT RABBIT
Jasper Fforde mixes the funnies with the bunnies in his new novel.
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320 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Jasper Fforde
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton
Jasper Fforde does racism. We’ll give you a moment to digest that. Jasper Fforde – renowned for his puntastic whimsies about fictional and fairy tale characters running riot in bizarre parallel middle-Englands run by all manner of buffoonish bureaucracies – is tackling racism, in a book published at the height of Black Lives Matter fervour.
There is so much potential for this to backfire horribly, especially as the downtrodden minority in the book are human-sized anthropomorphic rabbits – many of them white rabbits. This, surely, is an open call for outraged headlines about a privileged, middle-class author taking the piss out of a serious issue.
Astoundingly, Forde manages to pull off the seemingly impossible, not by reinventing his usual style to create something edgier and hard-hitting, but by embracing it. This is not so much a book about racism as one about white, middle-class angst about racism, especially set against an increasing wave of reactionary populism. And middle-class angst is clearly something Fforde is familiar with.
In Fforde’s latest alt-England, a Spontaneous Anthropomorphising Event in 1965 saw a number of rabbits (and a few other animals which we won’t reveal for spoilery reasons) turning overnight into talking, six-foot bunnies. Since then they’ve been breeding like, well, you know, leading to conflict between humans and rabbit kind – especially as rabbits will insist on maintaining elements of their own culture, such as duelling with pistols. This has lead to the rise of UKARP (United Kingdom Against Rabbit Population) whose leader is now Prime Minister. Following a referendum (won by only a narrow majority) all rabbits are soon to be forcibly moved to a MegaWarren in Wales.
Meanwhile, in the sleepy rural town of Much Hemlock, part-time librarian Peter Knox is delighted to learn that his new neighbour is an old flame from his university days, Constance Rabbit. He’s always carried a bit of a torch for her, but getting back together with her might be awkward; Peter now secretly works at the Rabbit Compliance Taskforce, a government department that uses some suspect measures to keep rabbits in check. Worse still, Peter was involved in an operation which lead to the death of Constance’s husband.
As you can probably tell even from that brief outline, the satire ain’t exactly subtle; you won’t be surprised to learn that UKARP’s leader is called Nigel and that the referendum was known as Rabxit (possibly the clunkiest neologism Fforde has ever come up with).
But the book is more subtle and interesting in other ways. Knox is a complex character, who knows his job is morally dubious but just wants to keep his head down and secure his pension. In him is embodied the book’s real theme: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” While Fforde has fun sending up his own image (“She was named Jocaminca fforks, with two small ‘f’s – as if having two ‘f’s wasn’t pretentious enough”), and even seems, at times, to be questioning his own right to write about racism, in the end he’s clearly decided that writing the book is better than doing nothing.
We should be glad he did, if for no other reason than that it’s given him an opportunity to subvert the “white saviour” trope. It’s huge fun too, with all the inventive wordplay, impeccable worldbuilding and fiendish plotting that Fforde’s “Constant Readers” have come to expect. Dave Golder
There are no talking rabbits in any Narnia book, but there is a talking hare, called Camillo. Is that splitting hares?
There’s potential for this to backfire