Soddit, The

Inhoud

Bingo Grabbins is a soddit who enjoys a comfortable life (apart from his feet, of course). But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard, Gandef, and a company of (bizarrely) Welsh dwarves (or dwarfs -- there is some debate about this) arrive one day to drag him away on an adventure.
They have a plot to raid the treasure hoard (or so they say) guarded by Smug, a large and very tedious dragon.
Bingo is understandably most reluctant to take part in this insane venture, but a dwarven (dwarfen?) dagger held politely to his throat soon surprises even himself and off the intrepid companions go on a quest that seems truly epic (well until you read about what later happened to Bingo's hapless cousin, at any rate).
Oh, and Bingo finds this ring thing -- goodness only knows what THAT'S all about...
A.R.R.R.Roberts, the famous Stuttering Author, was born. He is married, and is precisely middleaged, assuming that he will live to be seventy-six. His one-year-old daughter calls him Dada, possibly an allusion to the parallels between his life and the lives of Situationist radical avant-garde artists from the early twentieth century. Or perhaps for some other reason. Of his masterwork, the much-loved saga of Bingo the Soddit and his epic journey to confront Smug the Mighty Dragon, Roberts is on record as saying: 'How much? Alright. OK, OK, alright, when d'you want it done by? Yeah, yeah, I reckon that's doable.'

Bespreking

A Hobbit with a vengeance

Like every Soddit Bingo Grabbins enjoys a comfortable life and violently attacks anyone who dares to endanger this goal, as long as the opposition is much smaller than him, that is. Indeed Bingo can be a real pain in a dark cave, certainly when one treads on his extremely painful feet. So it is no wonder that when Gandef and his company of brainless Welsh dwarves force him to go on a long and tedious adventure that Bingo is far from happy and never misses an opportunity to make this very clear. And wouldn't one agree that he has reasons enough: wasn't it indeed Gandef who completely ruined Bingo's front door with a magical spell gone haywire? And by the way, the dwarves claim that they are on mission to find enormous amounts of free gold. Well, Bingo does not believe this to be the real purpose of their quest. They are probably out just to get in some real painful trouble and how Bingo pities his painful feet.

Although The Soddit hints at being a parody of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, it basically only uses the characters of that masterpiece of fantasy and tells a completely different story. True, Gandef and Bingo do go on a quest (although no one knows what the real purpose is), but that is about where the similarities end. In a way not following the original story has been a good decision, because it gives the reader the enjoyment of not knowing what will happen next. On the other side it also reveals that the author while writing the story never really had an ending in mind and just went along to see what the story would turn out to be. But then again, this kind of book is made by its puns and jokes, and The Soddit is really packed full with them. Of course not all of them are as funny as they were intended, but on average it has enough successful ones to make this book an enjoyable and hilarious read.