Summary: Jack is a thirteen-year-old kid who used to work in a clockwork factory and now wants to make his fortune in the city. Imagine his shock when he finds out that the city is TOY CITY, and everyone's either a toy or a 'Preadolescent Poetic Personality'. Then he teams up with a teddy called Eddie, and starts investigating the serial murders of the PPPs, starting with Humpty-Dumpty.

Rankin has written, up till and including 'The Hollow Chocolate ...', twenty-five books, of which I've read two. The first one was 'Armageddon: The Musical', a decent Douglas Adams imitation with Elvis involved in saving the world. I haven't read his other books, and I doubt I'll actually bother to buy any of them (I even got this one and 'Armageddon' from the library). But he's good. Very good, in fact, and let's see how, shall we?
Now the basic definition of the book, as it should be, is weird. Not in the manner of Monty Python, or even Douglas Adams, nor is he weird in a spaced-out way or in an avant-garde manner. In fact, he isn't very weird at all. And the reason for that is that he bothers a little too much with explanations and justification. A pointer for the future, dear Robert - don't. Would the Tiger sequence in The Meaning of Life have been as funny if we actually knew why Eric and Mike were dressed as a tiger? No. So please, try to refrain in the future.
But apart from that, I'm quite pleased with this book. For the last few days, I've been suffering from a dire lack of weirdness in my life - I've been through all my Python a million times, and I've read Douglas Adams till I almost couldn't bear him any longer. I even watched Hot Shots 2 three times in the last three days. But it all felt short, and then this book came to the rescue. Well, not quite, but at least it proved to be a short respite.
The book is very, very readable. More, in fact, than Adams's Dirk Gently books. And the first two chapters are quite wonderful - exactly as they should be. Even Jack's dialogue, with the 'proper' tone of his words, is very well-done. That vein should've been continued throughout the book, IMHO, because it's very funny. Also, cannibal farmers certainly aren't dime a dozen - certainly not ones that are as funny as these.
Also, Toy City is a very real world (there's a weird statement), with real characters and with richer sections and poorer ones (the city, not the characters). This plunges us into the world, and we don't come out till the end. The surrounding characters are interesting, and the whole thing about the royalties for nursery rhymes is pretty funny. The toys are hilarious as well, especially the two gatekeepers. The pseudo-serious stuff, however, is slightly less than interesting, but there isn't much of that anyway. And don't you love the way Little Boy Blue gets killed. And the Chocolate Bunnies are all the more interesting, because in the end they turn out to be basically nothing.
The situations and dialogues are indeed masterful, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Rankin had been working on this book for a long time. Also, the build-up of the scenes is extremely well-done, and the tension is mounted up in a way I wouldn't have deemed probable in this sort of book. The writing is tight (much tighter, in fact, than any given Adams book - a case of the disciple beating the master in at least one respect), and the dialogue crisp and efficient, especially the conversations between Jack and Eddie. And the revelation about Bill Winkie is quite hilarious.
My only complaint is the ending. It isn't bad, but the parody on mystery books and the whole thing about the worlds inside the worlds is much too complicated to be appreciated. To be complicated is certainly not a bad thing, but the writer has to be a master of his craft to do it well, and Ranking isn't one. Also, as I said, explanation can make everything tedious and overall much less effective. I would've changed the final confrontation if I were him.
But that doesn't spoil the book by much, because it certainly is, in my opinion, one of the high points of comedy in these last few years.

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