Bound Up With Books: The Hippopotamus

Hello, everyone – welcome to the new column ‘Bound up with Books’. I’m Psuke and I’ll be doing the reviewing.
Just so you know – I’ll be just as likely to be reviewing old books as new ones, and since my taste in printed material ranges all over the
map, I’m just as likely to review non-fiction as fiction. And some won’t be books in the usual sense – and by that I mean some will be works done in installments, published Online.

I’m opening with Stephen Fry’s second book, The Hippopotamus.

This book is like PG Wodehouse after a 12 martini lunch, and possibly an illicit substance or two.
Cynical and embittered poet Ted Wallace (the “Hippopotamus”) is at loose ends after being fired from his job as a theater reviewer.
His niece Jane makes him an offer he can’t refuse – to travel to the home of his old (and extremely wealthy) friend ‘to observe’,
as Jane is certain she has experienced a miracle. The object of his observation turns out to be his godson, Davy.
The results are brilliant moments of high and hysterical black humor.

It’s also often offensive, although Fry manages it with such elegant grace that you oftentimes catch yourself doing double-takes: “did he really
just say that?” Other times, it’s not so hidden. Fry’s protagonist isn’t called “The Hippopotamus” just for his stature.
Ted Wallace is profoundly anti-PC. Like many cynics that truly earned the title, he fought for all the right things back in the day, and found the results more
than lacking. A priggish, smug, stuck-up society with little entitlement to the right to gloat. As a result, he has no qualms at all in spewing his vitriol wherever he thinks appropriate,
and perhaps some places where it’s not.

Ted Wallace is also extremely skeptical of miracles, or quick fix solutions to complicated problems.
They don’t require any actual work, or lead to real change. It may feel good at the time, and it may even seem like somethings happening,
but when alls said and done – was anything truly accomplished?
Or was that hope misplaced? I’m not going to answer, because Fry does an excellent job of leaving you wondering right up until the end…

That isn’t to say that Wallace (or Fry, for that matter, although Stephen Fry could, in most respects,
be considered the antithesis of his protagonist Ted Wallace) doesn’t believe there are real problems to be addressed.
One section of the book recounts his best friend’s father’s brush with Nazi Germany, and the British collusion prior to Hitler’s
invading Germany. There is evil in the world. But that’s the danger of waiting for miracles:
it blinds us to the real work that needs to be done, and we may be left waiting for help that never comes.
Like the dinner party at the climax of the book, we’d rather get angry at the messenger than deal with that truth.

However – as serious as all that is – the thing to remember is that this is a funny book. It’s hysterical, and written with tongue
firmly in cheek 90% of the time. Go ahead and be offended if it pokes at your sacred cows and go ahead and laugh anyway.