The Constant Rabbit

by Jasper Fforde

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.

He liked it when he got his own way, and could do a passable imitation of a pleasant person once he did.

‘I once gave a thumbs-up sign to a bunch of teenage rabbits,’ said Toby, ‘before I understood how offensive it was. They caught me after a seven-mile chase.’ ‘Should have tried to escape in your car.’ ‘I was in a car. They can hop pretty fast when they want to.’

The best you could say about him was that on a good day he was hardly obnoxious at all, which made him seem like Julie Andrews in comparison to the Senior Group Leader or Nigel Smethwick.

In tests, eighty-two per cent of rabbits couldn’t tell the difference between Brian Blessed and a gorilla, if dressed in similar clothes.

Mrs Ponsonby was my aunt, and had an odd habit of contradicting herself in every sentence. Pippa called it ‘a demonstration of the duality of our species’. I called it ‘just plain annoying’.

Most agreed on one thing, however: it was better to have a mind capable of philosophising over the question of their existence than not. And chocolate eclairs. They were definitely worth having.

When I was twenty I had trouble doing one thing at a time. I still do.

‘I’m learning HR jargon and can’t decide which phrase I dislike more: Game changer, Onboarding or Going forward.’ ‘Blue sky thinking was always the one I disliked most.’ ‘That became too clichéd even for management-speak,’ she replied, ‘along with Thinking out of the box and We need a paradigm shift. They were all officially retired last year.

‘Prejudice is best lubricated with ignorance,’

‘I dislike his politics but can’t fault him on his use of the semi-colon,’

Had a sort of lumpy face that looked like a pothole repair done in haste and on a limited budget.’

If you really want to achieve your life goal, it’s probably best to keep it fairly simple.’

‘Humans talk a great deal,’ said Doc, ‘and seemingly understand how they should behave – but rarely do.

They’re not human, which is legally useful, but they’re cuddly with big eyes, something the otherwise apathetic general public often finds irresistible.

while All Saints would probably tolerate a killing, the dismembering I had planned might not go down too well, and having one without the other is like a Spice Girls reunion without Posh. Besides, I’ve just had this suit dry-cleaned.’

Still, at least I don’t have a gambolling problem – that leads only to ruin.’ Compulsive gambolling in meadows could lead to excessive fatigue and a narrowing of career and social focus. Third to gambolling and burrowing as a social ill was ‘tripping the orange fantastic’, the slang for over-consumption of carrots.

if you let people – foxes, politicians, media outlets, platforms, whatever – get away with unacceptable behaviour, then it emboldens them and others to greater and more extreme conduct.

Our version of The Comedy of Errors has nine sets of identical sextuplets. It’s much funnier. Shakespeare really missed a trick on that one.’

Rabbit playwrights have rewritten Shakespeare to appeal to more rabbit audiences for a long time. The performance of Seven Thousand and Eighty-Three Noble Kinsmen was met with great acclaim in 1973, and 1982’s A Comedy of Ears is considered a benchmark adaptive literary work. Not all were so successful: A Winter’s Cottontail was panned by rabbit critics, all of whom thought it was simply an ‘excuse for a feeble pun’.

Harvey said that any attack on the colony permits the Grand Council to invoke Bugs Bunny Protocols – namely, that almost any behaviour is permissable once a rabbit is pushed into a corner – even violence.’

‘Rabbits rarely lie,’ said Pippa. ‘They take their greatest pride in preserving most strongly the parts of them that aren’t us.’

While most humans are wired to be reasonably decent, a few are wired to be utter shits – and they do tend to tip the balance.’

The way we see it, London is just one massive money-laundering scheme attached to an impressive public transport system and a few museums, of which even the most honest has more stolen goods than a lock-up garage in Worcester rented by a guy I know called Chalky.’

when you’ve lusted after bacon and eggs, my friend, you’ve already committed breakfast in your soul.’ ‘That’s amusingly deep.’ ‘It was C.S. Lewis,’ mused Doc.

We were, I learned later, only one of twenty-six work gangs making cucumber sandwiches, the snack of choice for rabbits when nerves need to be calmed and the future is in doubt. Carrots are more for pleasure and everyday eating, dandelion leaves for when you just want to shoot the breeze – equivalent to a cup of coffee and a Danish. Radishes are for a hangover, parsnips for when you need a boost, turnips when there’s nothing left in the larder. There were gallons of tea, too, but that was handled by someone else.

‘It’s not working out for us, Pete. Driving cars and talking and having TV was kind of fun, and clothes and eating out totally rock. But the hate, the fear, the greed. It just doesn’t make any sense. You’re trying to run a twenty-first-century world on Palaeolithic thoughts and sentiments.’