Some idler is sure to begin a critique of Stephen Fry’s funny, sharp-tongued novel The Hippopotamus (Random House; 290 pages; $21) by referring loftily to the title character as “the eponymous hippopotamus.” Shun this pedant, who should consider another line of work. Read the novel, however. Its virtues are cynicism and ill will, directed energetically at all that is trendy and modern, and embodied in the blubbery, whiskified carcass of an out-of-date poet named Ted Wallace.
Wallace is the novel’s Hippo, so nicknamed decades before as an undergraduate (the reference is to T.S. Eliot’s doggerel, “The hippopotamus’ day/ Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;/ God works in a mysterious way-/ The Church can sleep and feed at once …”). Wallace was a drama critic for one of the seedier London newspapers until he arose during an idiotic stage performance and screamed curses. At liberty, he is asked by a terminally ill goddaughter to find out whether a moody 15-year-old boy, Wallace’s godson, really has a powerful healing gift. The lad, it appears, lays on not merely hands but sexual parts to effect his cures and in this way seems to have worked wonders with the god-daughter, an elderly gay houseguest and a sick mare.
In the wise and civilized tradition of so much of English fiction, the setting is a vast country house; this convention ensures a large cast of eccentrics untroubled by middle-class worries about where the next case of Mouton-Rothschild is coming from. Credulity about miracle cures ripens among these Blimps and boozers. It is up to Wallace, whose sanity is battered but intact, to thread his way through his hangover and puzzle out a non-paranormal explanation. As he does, he rages entertainingly at a glorious array of targets, generally returning to the furies of sex. Wallace’s discerning view is that women tolerate sex so as to have men around and that men, whose fateful hormones reverse this comedy, are far more sorely afflicted.
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