The
Blunders. By David Walliams.
Illustrated by Adam Stower. HarperCollins. $9.99.
It is rarely relevant to know that a U.S. edition of a book was first
published elsewhere, but it is important in the case of The Blunders, enjoyment of which will largely depend on which side
of the pond one inhabits. “The pond” is the Atlantic Ocean, and anyone unaware
of that rather basic geographical/expressive fact should avoid David Walliams’
book if he or she lives on the western side of the pond. Those to its east
should be fine and will be tickled, sometimes to outrageous gales of laughter,
by all the moronic escapades and nonsensical antics chronicled by Walliams in
this extended series of stories about “classic upper-class twits.”
That particular expression is easy enough for pretty much anyone to
understand, as are numerous other Britishisms whose context makes their meaning
apparent even if one does not happen to use them oneself. “Oiks,” for example,
is pretty clearly something or someone negative – indeed, most everyone in The Blunders is an oik to one degree or
another – and one need not know the formal definition (“an uncouth or obnoxious
person”) to get the point. Similarly, “doobry,” as used in The Blunders, pretty clearly refers to what Americans tend to call
“number two” when speaking of bathroom matters, even though the word in British
slang is actually a lot less specific than that (referring to pretty much any
unnamed or unnamable object) – this is a case where Walliams, who is very fond of bathroom-related material
of the “constant breaking of wind” variety, massages a slang term in a way that
makes it understandable enough on both sides of the pond.
Other elements of Walliams’ vocabulary, however, will be so unfamiliar
in North America as to confuse young readers rather than enlighten them (to the
very, very tiny extent that anything in The
Blunders is enlightening). For example, one entire story in the book is
“The Scandal of the Giant Marrow,” and anyone unfortunate enough to think that
“marrow” here refers to a component of bones, human or otherwise, is going to
have an extremely difficult and disappointing time trying to understand how an
errant airship can be changed into “the most marvellous [sic] marrow the world had EVER SEEN!” The transformation is
important because the Blunders’ actual marrow is more like “a baby courgette.”
See the problem? And that is only part of it, since the whole marrow
incident comes to a climax at a village gathering that includes “tombola” and
“coconut shy.” All of this is perfectly understandable in the wilds of Great
Britain, and even the not-so-wilds, but relocate The Blunders – the book, not the family – a few thousand miles
westward and unintended confusion reigns.
Actually, intended confusion, not to mention ridiculousness, reigns
throughout the book, and a great deal of the slapstick will be hilarious to
young readers in any English-speaking location. The Blunders are, not to put
too fine a point on it, a bunch of idiots, not in a pejorative sense but in the
way idiots are portrayed in such venues as Monty
Python’s Flying Circus, where they are a normal part of everyday village existence
and add color (or colour) to ordinary people’s otherwise drab lives. The overriding
plot of The Blunders has to do with
Lord Bertie Blunder, the father figure in the family, mortgaging the Blunders’
ruined, wrecked, falling-down, leaky, barely standing home to the bank for
money to develop one of his harebrained inventions, which immediately fails, so
the family home will shortly be lost to the bank, so the Blunders need to figure
out how to save it from an officious twit of a banker (not to be confused with unofficious twits such as the Blunders
themselves) – who intends to turn the house into a borstal (and there goes that
vocabulary issue again). There are lots and lots of ridiculous misadventures
that mostly make messes mount higher and higher and that make sense only if one
does not apply even the slightest smidgen of logic to them – for instance, the
entire home is completely flooded, all the way up to the attic, at one point,
but once the Blunders’ pet ostrich saves the day and sweeps away “the man from
the bank and his brutish bailiffs,” the next page starts in a different season
of the year and there is not the slightest word about anything having needed to
dry out, much less any remarks regarding mold and mildew. (Why the banker wants
to transform rather than disintegrate the Blunders’ home is yet another of
those questions that it is best not to ask.)
About that ostrich: as often in books of this sort, it is saner (and,
for that matter, more intelligent) than the central human characters. The only
person with an ounce of sense, or maybe half an ounce, is the family’s 99-year-old
butler, Butler (that name is a ha-ha, or wants to be). Lord Bertie’s wife, Lady
Betsy, is certifiably insane, or would be on the western side of the pond,
because she spends all her time riding on, feeding, communicating with and
cleaning up after her horse, Pegasus – which does not exist. Old Lady Blunder,
Bertie’s mother, is in her 80s and spends her time shooting things – yes, this
is played entirely for laughs in the Looney
Tunes vein, and of course she does not use a pistol or rifle but a
blunderbuss (another intended ha-ha). The inevitable two kids are 12-year-old
Bunny, who believes she is an artistic genius even though she has never tried
to do anything artistic except, at one point, to screech what she imagines
opera probably sounds like; and 10-year-old Brutus, who spends all his time
being filthy (hiding in toilets, eating worms that he digs up, that sort of
thing). Bunny and Brutus spend most of their time “being beastly” to each
other, although at one point they do work together on something and briefly,
“for the first time in yonks, the grown-ups didn’t hear a peep out of the
pair.”
The opportunities for lowbrow comedy among these barmy numpties are endless, and Walliams spins out the stories about them pretty much endlessly, pausing occasionally to wink at or with readers, as in, “I don’t need to go on and on explaining, or this book would become unspeakably long and boring.” And: “No one could have predicted what happened next. Not even me, and I am making all this up.” It is all patently absurd, indeed beyond patently absurd, and it is all tosh, drivel and bunkum, none of which words happens to appear in The Blunders even though the meaning of all three of them will be substantially clearer to non-British readers than the meaning of a number of the words that do show up in the book.
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