Fattypuffs and Thinifers

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years later, I was still trying to remember the salient identifying details of the book well enough to locate a copy for my personal library. To The Times Literary Supplement on 27 December 1941, 'This most amusing fantasy' won pride of place in a review of many juveniles, but purely as comedy. A children’s fantasy first published in 1930, this book tells of two brothers, the thin Terry and the plump Edward, who descend into an underground world. Fattypuffs and Thinifers do not mix, and their respective countries are on the verge of war when Edmund and Terry make their visit.

The quality of writing and plot are sufficient to warrent a wide adult readership as well, and, like all classics, it will never go out of date. Whether you are a jolly Fattypuff or a driven Thinifer you’ll be rooting for the brothers to bring peace to the countries under the Earth. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Edmund soon assumes an important position in the administration of Fattypuff, whose inhabitants are friendly, happy, and who live only for drinking and eating. If you are a parent/adult fretting about a girl who is only 10 but who reads Cosmo during morning "playtime" and can quote Bridget Jones/Marian Keyes/Sophie Kinsella verbatim and who is already talking about diets and thighmasters at age 7, then I would read this.It was a wonderfully droll account of war between two nations over the silliest and most nonsensical of philosophies and I was terribly impressed by the moral admonishment it contained about the eternal senselessness of human warfare.

The land below is split into two camps the rather rotund Fattypuffs and the seriously skinny Thinifers.The Thinifers on the other hand are stick-thin workaholics who rarely eat and inhabit a world of thin spires, narrow laneways and travel to and fro on thin railway lines. Despite being total strangers to each culture the boys are taken in and welcomed and given homes and eventually their positions in their relative families allows them to influence decisions being made about the Fattypuff vs Thinifer war. It concerns the imaginary underground land of the fat and congenial Fattypuffs and the thin and irritable Thinifers, which is visited by the Double brothers, the plump Edmund and the thin Terry. I came across it at school, perhaps it sticks in the mind because of how thorough going the fantasy is. He died during 1967 after a long career as an author of novels, biographies, histories, children's books and science fiction stories.

A timeless fable, one to read to the kids in bed which will leave mum and dad equally entertained and enthralled as a reflection of the equally insane world they are growing up in today. I realise that sounds a bit heavy for kids, but it makes them and you think - what would happen if the UK were strictly segregated along lines of weight? If you are not terribly impressed after reading this timeless book, there's essentially no hope for you, friend, and in that case the Bush administration has a place for you on its Pentagon War Planning Staff as the outgoing Administration gears up for an invasion of Iran. While not exactly plump, I was a sturdy child and had no difficulty in identifying with all the pleasures and comforts enjoyed by the Fattipuffs but the fact is that I cannot imagine anyone, however gaunt and disciplined and filled with all the other Thinifer virtues, who would actually prefer, for example, the Thinifer bed where an alarm clock immediately projects you into a cold bath to the warm and cosy fourposter in which the Fattipuff will luxuriate – with taps in each of the four posts from which drinks of different sorts can be extracted!Although as an admirer of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, I fully appreciated the greater benefit of thining out the world's population of thoughtless idiots that war bestows on us, I have incidentally been opposed to war all of my life. There have been many reprints and different editions and even (anathema from my point of view) new sets of illustrations but there may still be some of you who have not come upon the book before, so I had better explain. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. And it took a war as well as a lot of argument before the boys could teach them to agree about anything.