I was pretty confused by this. Michael Bond’s the dude that wrote all of the Paddington Bear books, so finding out that he has also been busily writing bat face crazy books about a French inspector who works for the restaurant guide, Le Guide, is a bit out of nowhere. Especially considering the fact that they are a weird cross between Allo Allo, The Pink Panther and a Carry On film.
With a super sleuth dog called Pommes Frites, and a bizarre storyline taking in a smear campaign against Le Guide along with a nun that apparently has a thing for the Mile High Club, Monsieur Pamplemousse and the French Solution sounds like a comedy farce that could either be strangely amusing or just a bit on the lame side.
They’re never going to be seminal books, but they could possibly be funny departures from seminal books. Like humorous interlude between reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment and Tolstoy’s War & Peace. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are usually good for this, but it’s hard to tell whether or not Michael Bond’s books would work in the same way.
Monsieur Pamplemousse and the French Solution is out on paperback on 11th April 2011. It’s obviously a complete farce, so the stereotypically French characters and storyline can’t be taken seriously. I’m not really a big fan of society’s fixation on what divides us; not everyone can see where the line is between a good natured joke and racism. There are plenty of people that misunderstood Till Death Us Do Part, taking it’s racist comments as the joke, instead of the absurdity of the racism as the butt of the joke. However, if Monsieur Pamplemousse is just a none stop laugh at le French, then it’s probably never going to be all that class.
