Contents
About the Author
Also by Jasper Fforde
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Speed Librarying
Toast & TwoLegsGood
Spotters & Spotting
Fudds and Flopsies
Ross & Rabbits
Griswold & Gossip
Pippa & Pasta
Next Sunday, Next Door
Searching in vain & Shopping in town
Senior Group Leader
Dinner & Dandelion Brandy
Labstock Bunshot
Rabbit Riot
Shopping & Sally Lomax
Tittle-Tattle and Toast
All Saints, All Spite
Cops & Kitten
The Thespian Talk-Through
Toby’s Torn T-shirt
Connie & Caution
Morning Mood
MegaWarren
Car & Custody
The Art of the Deal
Bunnytrap Trap
Bouncing with Constance
Bugged Bunny
Dinner & Deity
Cordiality Collapse
Lapin Flambé & HMP Leominster
The Trials of Lance deBlackberry
Rabbit Colony One
Endgame
The Battle of May Hill
Aftermath
Acknowledgements:
Footnotes
About the Author
Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the New York Times bestseller list with The Eyre Affair in 2001. Since then he has written another twelve novels, including the Number One Sunday Times bestseller One of our Thursdays is Missing, and the Last Dragonslayer series, adapted for television by Sky.
Fforde lives and works in his adopted nation of Wales.
Also by Jasper Fforde
The Thursday Next Series
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten
First Among Sequels
One of Our Thursdays is Missing
The Woman Who Died a Lot
The Nursery Crime Series
The Big Over Easy
The Fourth Bear
Shades of Grey
Early Riser
The Dragonslayer Series
(for young adult readers)
The Last Dragonslayer
The Song of the Quarkbeast
The Eye of Zoltar
THE CONSTANT RABBIT
Jasper Fforde
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Jasper Fforde 2020
The right of Jasper Fforde to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover image: Cover images © shutterstock.com
The quote used in the epigraph here from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (© Bill Bryson 2003), first published in the UK in 2003 by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 76362 1
Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 444 76363 8
eBook ISBN 978 1 444 76365 2
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
It cannot be said too often: all life is one.
A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson
To the human eye, each rabbit looks very much like the other.
The Private Life of the Rabbit – R.M. Lockley
Speed Librarying
Somebody once said that the library is actually the dominant life form on the planet. Humans simply exist as the reproductive means to achieve more libraries.
‘Still on the Westerns, Baroness Thatcher?’ I asked, moving slowly down the line of volunteers who were standing at readiness outside our library, a smallish mock-mock-Tudor building in the middle of Much Hemlock, itself more or less in the middle of the county of Hereford, which in turn was pretty much in the middle of the UK.
Much Hemlock was, in pretty much every meaning of the word, middling.
‘Westerns are the best when they’re not really Westerns at all,’ said Baroness Thatcher, ‘like when more akin to the Greek Epics. True Grit, for example.’
‘Shane is more my kind of thing,’ said Stanley Baldwin, who I think fancied himself as a softly spoken man of understated power and influence. Winston Churchill opined they were both wrong and that The Ox-Bow Incident was far better with its generally positive themes of extrajudicial violence. Neville Chamberlain tried to keep the peace and find some middle ground on the issue while David Lloyd George simply sat there in quiet repose, mentally preparing for the adrenaline-fuelled six minutes of Speed Librarying that lay before us.
Perhaps I should explain. The UKARP Government’s much-vaunted Rural Library Strategic Group Vision Action Group had kept libraries open as per their election manifesto, but reduced the librarian staffing levels in Herefordshire to a single, solitary example working on greatly reduced hours – which meant that each of the county’s twelve libraries could be open for precisely six minutes every two weeks.
And this is where my hand-picked team of faux politicians entered the picture. Using a mixture of careful planning, swiftness of foot, a robust understanding of the Dewey Decimal Book Categorisation System and with strict adherence to procedure, we could facilitate a fortnight’s worth of returns, loans, reserves and extensions in the three hundred and sixty seconds available to us. It was known to all and sundry as a Buchblitz.
My name is Peter Knox, but for the next six minutes I’ll be your John Major.
‘Ready, Stanley?’ I asked Mr Baldwin, who oversaw returns and reservations but was actually retired Wing Commander Slocombe, a former RAF officer who famously lost an ear while ejecting out of a Hawker Hunter over Aden. Remarkably, a solitary ear was retrieved from the wreckage of the aircraft and reattached. Even more remarkably, it wasn’t his.
‘Three times ready, Team Leader.’
‘Mr Major?’ asked Mrs Griswold, who usually ran the Much Hemlock village shop, post office, gossip exchange and pub combined. ‘I can’t remember if I’m Winston Churchill or David Lloyd George.’
‘You’re David Lloyd George,’ I said. ‘You select the books from the shelves to be given to Mr Chamberlain, who takes them to the counter and to Mrs Thatcher, who offers them up to the Sole Librarian to be stamped. It’s really very simple.’