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At this time of year, many of us could use a good laugh. After all, once all of that festive “White Christmas” stuff is behind us, winter seems to turn colder and drearier (and a whole lot less festive). So now’s the perfect time to set aside your heavy, dramatic novels and pick up something a little…kookier. Like Tom Holt’s latest, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages.
Real estate attorney Polly Mayer is pretty sure that she’s losing her mind. Whenever she leaves her office, she comes back to find that someone’s been drinking her coffee—and doing her paperwork. At first, she figures that it’s just the work of some office prankster—but then, one afternoon, she goes to the dry cleaner’s to pick up her dress, and she finds that the cleaner’s has disappeared. It’s just gone—as though it never even existed.
Normally, Polly’s brother, Don, is the sensible one. But not this time. This time, Don can’t tell Polly that everything’s fine—because he’s experiencing it, too. And it all seems to have something to do with the brass pencil sharpener that he found in his jacket pocket, right after he picked it up from the cleaner’s—the one that no longer exists.
With its time-twisting tales of parallel worlds, poultry convinced that they’re human, and bathroom portals leading to dueling knights, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages feels like a crazy mix of Monty Python and Terry Pratchett. The story is cleverly written, and it’s absolutely mind-boggling—a silly fantasy about farm animals, real estate tycoons, and (for lack of a better word) Magic. In Holt’s wild imagination, people exist on parallel planes. Magical men live in houses in the clouds. And businesses can simply up and disappear without a trace in the middle of the night. Somehow, it’s all tied together—and, in the end, it even makes some kind of bizarre sense—but it’s also one wildly tangled, fantastical jumble.
Through it all, readers will be pleasantly perplexed, trying to figure out how it all works. There are plenty of magical mysteries to be solved—mysteries that you’ll never, ever (not in a million years) figure out. So it might be best just to sit back and enjoy the ride. And what a ride it is! The characters (both human and feathered) are amusing—and although their warped little adventures are sure to make your head spin, they’re also absolutely hilarious (in the craziest of ways).
So if winter’s getting you down—and you’re desperately in need of something completely different—then Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages is worth picking up. You’ll most likely get completely lost in its muddle of pigs and parallel universes, but it’s a cleverly comical escape from those dreary winter afternoons.
