Ted Wallace is weary beyond all human capacity for weariness of the mindless pap that is served up under the guise of 21st century "culture", and can hardly be blamed for seeking refuge in a bottle of whisky, or rather a great many bottles of whisky.

The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry | Goodreads

In The Hippopotamus (1994), Fry has his ever-sarcastic narrator railing against the problem of words.

Part of the fun of realizing that a novel's narrator is unreliable is that the whole structure of the book becomes a puzzle—which are the bits that we ought to believe?

Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry | Goodreads The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry | Goodreads

Between drinking bouts and Skype chats with Jane (updating the novel’s epistolary passages), Ted conducts his half-hearted detective work. A story that might not be for everybody, like the reviews and ratings clearly shows, but if now and then you like the complexity of the English language instead of the usual stuff you might enjoy this movie. I'm not sure anyone other than Fry himself could do justice to the role of Ted Wallace, or at least so I thought before watching Roger Allam in the role. Ted further reveals David's confidence in his semen's abilities and that this led him to have morally dubious sex with Jane, Lilac and Oliver. You might read it for its evocation of an age or for its depiction of the cultures, attitudes, and race all colliding in 'Enlightenment' England, but whatever you bring to the book, the book will bring to you adventure, romance, and the full flowering of a magnificent literary hero, all told in wonderful prose and with dazzling energy and brilliant panache.

At times the dialogue would have seemed very pretentious but it illustrates Fry's love of the English language and how to use it to maximum effect".

The Hippopotamus - Rotten Tomatoes The Hippopotamus - Rotten Tomatoes

If you want a fun romp with a thriller basis this book is for you at least until it switches genres. Ted explains that the breaking of his whisky bottle led him to realise that Lilac's poisoning was actually a hangover from drinking the contents of a bottle he dropped in an outdoor bucket earlier in the film, that Simon's CPR had rescued his mother during her asthma attack and that Jane's recovery from leukaemia was a remission of its symptoms. Almost every reader will see some of their own foibles in him at some point in the text, which can make for some uncomfortable reading moments.The Liar, a juicily irreverent book which draws from the author’s own life, was, unsurprisingly, an immediate success.