Nursery Rhymes and Crimes

I wasn't really raised on nursery rhymes.  Nor fairy tales.  I didn't really read either until I was well into my teens.  Though I was well acquainted with Beatrix Potter, and I may have come across The Billy Goats Gruff while in hospital as a child (do all hospitals have children's libraries in the playroom?), and I seem to remember somehow hearing about The Gingerbread Man, generally my childhood knowledge of tales and rhymes was limited. 


All that to say I found Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear fun in so many different ways.  It was, I believe, even more enjoyable than The Eyre Affair.  The novelty of it coupled with the humour just drew me in and kept me going through the absurdities.  Not that I mind absurdities, and it's only once in a very rare while that they become groan-worthy in a Fforde novel.  I found myself looking up various nursery rhyme characters as they popped up (known in the novel as 'Persons of Dubious Reality') and I was surprised at how consistently ignorant I was.   I'd never heard of the Quangle Wangle, for example. And, although Punch and Judy and Caliban are all familiar, what or who was a Jack Spratt?  Needless to say, educating oneself on the intricacies of nursery rhyme characters is rather diverting.  


But its not all mindless fun.  There's also mindful fun.  Little gems of satire and irony about how government works,  the troubles between 'regular' people and the PDRs highlighting the prevalence of latent xenophobia that most societies still suffer from, and the dangers related to selling one's soul for a Dorian Grey car (one of those intriguing little details that make one want to exclaim aloud, awed by Fforde's imagination). And that's just scratching the surface, really.  I was surprised when I came across an interview of Jasper Fforde in which he referred to himself as sort of the dim one in his family.  These stories are so complex and intelligent (and did I mention fun?) that it made me wonder what the others are like if he's the dim one.