Synopses & Reviews
"I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn."
So begins the tale of Ted Wallace, known (unaffectionately) as the Hippopotamus. Failed poet, failed theater critic, failed father and husband, Ted has his faults, too: he is a shameless womanizer, drinks too much, and is at odds in his cranky but maddeningly logical way with most of modern life. Fired from his newspaper, Ted seeks a few months' repose and free liquor at Swafford Hall, the country mansion of his old friend Michael Logan, to whose beautiful and mysterious son David, Ted is godfather.
Strange things have been going on at Swafford. Miracles. Healings. Phenomena beyond the comprehension of an old-fashioned hippopotamus like Ted. As other guests arrive beautiful Patricia, who smells of cucumber juice; Oliver Mills, who writes in a diary named Daisy; fourteen-year-old Clara, whose buck teeth come horrifically into their own; and Rebecca, one of the few women Ted has encountered who actually enjoys sex events hurtle toward a breathtaking climax.
The Hippopotamus is a remarkable, totally original novel. Like Fry's first novel, The Liar, it has spent months at the top of British best-seller lists. Savagely comic and profoundly humane, it celebrates the human spirit in a manner that will simultaneously shock, delight, and inspire. The Hippopotamus will be with you always.
Review
"Imagine Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, and William Burroughs breaking bread (or wind) together on the playing fields of Eton and you have some idea of where Fry seems destined to stand, or squat, in the literary firmament." The Boston Globe
Review
"English polymath Fry (actor, playwright, newspaper columnist, fledgling novelist) is one of the funniest people writing on either side of the Atlantic....His ruminations, including achingly funny riffs on subjects as varied as how much more difficult sex is for men than for women, and why it's easier to be a composer or artist than a poet, are like a combination of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis but, because Fry is such a dazzling mimic and has a splendid ear for contemporary jargon, funnier than either. His plot is decidedly weird: Ted's goddaughter Jane, apparently cured of cancer by the gifts of a teenage son of a rich tycoon, sends Ted off to the tycoon's family seat in Norfolk to find out how the kid does it. In the end, of course, Ted does so, acting as a rather improbable detective, but only after a series of imaginative set pieces, including a scene with a horse that has to be read to be believed. Fry's wicked queenie patter in the persona of 'Mother' Oliver is alone worth the price of the book." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Some idler is sure to begin a critique of Stephen Fry's funny, sharp-tongued novel 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." John Skow, Time
Review
"This is a very funny and carefully structured book. Fry shifts the plot (a good one) along, moving easily in and out of epistolary, narrative and first-person forms. Whisky-sodden and self-indulgent at the first encounter, Ted turns, if not into a warm and wonderful human being, at least into a likeable hero. Part of Fry's skill is that he has brought some sombre themes into this rural romp. Death, cruelty, and the nature of goodness are woven among camp comic dialogue and Ted's splenetic outpourings." Susan Jeffreys, New Statesman & Society
Review
"[Fry] has come up with a book that is brilliant, marvellous, filthy, moral, and funny." The New Statesman (London)
Review
"At his best, Fry suggests Wilde's transcendent flippancy, Evelyn Waugh's waspishness, and the sunny absurdity of Jeeves's creator, P.G. Wodehouse. (At his worst he either goes solemn as in the book's ickily upbeat ending or finds flatulence irresistibly comic.) The Hippopotamus, in fact, could be a Wodehouse plot a boozy ex-poet at a country house where the host's teenage son appears to have mystic healing powers until you hit the smut. On about page one. And when Fry's over-the-hill hero yearns for a young woman with 'breasts that stand up like begging dogs,' we sense the possibilities of Wodehousian surrealism in an age of indecency." David Gates, Newsweek
Review
"Most surprisingly...is how successfully Fry transforms the sophomoric into the sophisticated a skill shared, not coincidentally, by his comic forebears, Monty Python." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Satire is not the art of being wicked, but the art of being wickedly funny, and to make this sort of [novel] work you have to be as outrageous (and clever) as P.J. O'Rourke or as surgical (and clever) as Tom Wolfe. Stephen Fry, alas, comes across like P.G. Wodehouse trying to be J.P. Donleavy....A structural disaster, The Hippopotamus is one of those amateurish books whose parts are far better than the whole. Mr. Fry's manufacturing of brand names like Aqua Robinetto to describe a fictitious brand of upscale tap water will keep the reader chuckling. But his incessant verbal pyrotechnics are not always up to snuff, as when he writes, 'In this small room the sharp point of the Truth finally forced itself deep inside him until it tore at the walls of his heart.' There is a word to describe this kind of writing, and the word is not 'good.'" Joe Queenan, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Marvelous dialog enlivens a tale that is fraught with incest, bestiality, and English humor. Obviously, only for special tastes..." Library Journal
Review
"A tremendously enjoyable read...crammed with splendid jokes, gloriously demented swear-word combinations, and unrepeatable descriptions of myriad sexual acts." The Tatler (London)
Review
"[W]hile Mr. Fry takes Eliot's theme and gives it a clever spin, his voice is decidedly his own: slangy, frantic and enthusiastically ribald, closer in spirit and style to Monty Python than anything Eliot ever dreamed of." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Synopsis
In his clever second novel, the author of The Liar introduces readers to Ted Wallace: failed poet, failed theater critic, failed father and husband, shameless womanizer, and self-confessed alcoholic. When Ted invites himself to the country estate of his beautiful and mysterious godson under the pretense of writing a family history, the result is "a deliciously wicked and amusing little fable" (New York Times).
About the Author
Stephen Fry has starred in numerous television series (Jeeves and Wooster, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Blackadder) and films (Peter's Friends, I.Q., Wilde), and has written plays, screenplays (A Confederacy of Dunces), a musical (Me and My Girl), and a weekly column for the London Daily Telegraph. He has written the novels The Liar and Making History, as well as an autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot.