Will anyone publish my rabbit tale?

The literary sensation of the season is apparently a book called The Constant Rabbit, by Jasper Fforde. In brief, a spontaneous and unexplained anthropomorphic event which occurred 55 years ago has left Britain with a population of more than one million human-sized rabbits who can speak, read, watch television etc. They live among us. The Guardian called the book ‘chilling and realistic’, which perhaps gives you an insight into the level of general insanity that pertains in that institution.

The book is of course a satire. The poor rabbits are victimised by right-wing thugs and subjected to all kinds of horrors. The government is led by the United Kingdom Anti-Rabbit party, headed by a man called Nigel who plans to build a giant warren somewhere so that all the rabbits can be bundled inside. So, somewhat heavy-handed satire, no? A book from a pleasant middle-class private schoolboy about our nasty reaction to immigration and why we should be a lot nicer to incomers. You can see why it was published: it is exactly what our liberal elite thinks, and the easier the target, the more they like it.

By contrast, my own novel The Lucky, Lucky Rabbits has not yet been published and I doubt very much that it will be. My plot concerns a spontaneous and unexplained anthropomorphic event which has left the UK with a population of eight million human-sized rabbits. There is very little leporiphobia on behalf of the human population — indeed, when one rabbit is called a ‘carrot-munching little bastard’, the victim’s story is front page in the newspapers and the lead story for a week on the BBC. Rather than being discriminated against, the rabbits are given quotas on shortlists for parliamentary seats, favoured in job applications and university places and their own somewhat thinnish history of achievement as a species shoehorned into the national curriculum.