Peter Knox is a man who has a job he tolerates and a boss he hates so he can spend his days off indulging in idiosyncratic hobbies and family time with his daughter. He is a resident of Much Hemlock, a quintessentially English village where the talk of the town is winning the annual \u2018Spick and Span\u2019 awards and the local fete is the highlight of the social calendar. Life couldn\u2019t be more ordinary\u2026 until the Rabbits arrive in the village.<\/p>\n
These aren\u2019t your usual Beatrix Potter affair we’re talking about here, these are walking, talking 6ft tall anthropomorphised Cadbury\u2019s Caramel-looking bunnies.<\/p>\n
To clarify, at some point during the 1960s, for no particular reason at all, an assortment of cute, cotton-tailed, carrot eating Rabbits suddenly grew to the size of a human beings and started acting like them too. Since this \u2018event\u2019 they have bred like\u2026 well\u2026 Rabbits.<\/p>\n
While the citizens of the UK initially welcomed the comically novel Rabbit into their world, times and attitudes have slowly changed and England now finds itself at a breaking point, introducing a \u2018voluntary\u2019 rehoming initiative; collecting all the rabbits into one single MegaWarren, somewhere in Wales.<\/p>\n
Jasper Fforde\u2019s hilariously poignant new satire The Constant Rabbit<\/strong><\/em> begins when Knox meets his new neighbours, Constance Rabbit (she\u2019s a rabbit) and her husband. However, when the residents of Much Hemlock take an overtly distasteful dislike to the new arrivals, Peter finds himself conscripted into a brewing battle between the ruling power of the UKARP (United Kingdom Anti-Rabbit Party) and the Rabbit resistance where he is forced to confront his own prejudices and contradictions of conscience.<\/p>\n Fforde\u2019s engaging writing has created a story that is a clever blend of the biting allegorical satire we expect from Orwell\u2019s greatest hits and the good-natured adventures of Michael Bond\u2019s na\u00efve and kind-hearted Paddington Bear. Ridiculous hypotheticals are subtly and persistently unravelled into considered and relevant reflections on prejudice and morality. It is, after all, plainly absurd to grant a giant rabbit human rights, but then again, when they can walk, talk and reason like you and I, what makes them any different? Apart from their appearance\u2026 their language\u2026 their cultural customs\u2026 oh wait a minute.<\/p>\n The perpetual twist from the ridiculous to the painfully obvious is never mean spirited or sanctimonious. The tone of the book is wrapped up in a familiar style of British wit that sits somewhere between pleasant bemusement at all of life\u2019s little complexities, and the pious indignation we feel at someone not saying thank you after you hold the door open for them.<\/p>\n The plot pointedly subverts the clich\u00e9s of typical dystopian sci-fi, where rebellions are led by a reluctant hero or a rag-tag band of resistance fighters. Instead, it focuses on the little changes that every individual can accomplish in order to really make a lasting difference. To say the book is timely is to ignore the fact that it is also timeless. The metaphors and themes are both prescient and historic. The messages powerful and important. While closing the last page will have you gleefully chuckling at an amusing tale, as you return it to the bookshelf you will be left alone to consider and confront your own personal feelings on complicity.<\/p>\n The Constant Rabbit is out now<\/a> from Hodder & Stroughton. Read our interview with Jasper Fforde here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We review Jasper Fforde\u2019s hopping hilarious satire, The Constant Rabbit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":113201,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"MSN_Categories":"Uncategorized","MSN_Publish_Option":false,"MSN_Is_Local_News":false,"MSN_Is_AIAC_Included":"Empty","MSN_Location":"[]","MSN_Add_Feature_Img_On_Top_Of_Post":false,"MSN_Has_Custom_Author":false,"MSN_Custom_Author":"","MSN_Has_Custom_Canonical_Url":false,"MSN_Custom_Canonical_Url":""},"categories":[1624,8],"tags":[6875],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/The-Constant-Rabbit.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}