Under The Frog

Tibor Fischer

Under the Frog is writer Tibor Fischer's debut novel, published back in 1992. The book won the Betty Trask Award in 1993 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Since then, Fischer's output has disappointed the critics ("High hopes were upon him, and that's often hard. But his career since then has seemed a gripless slide into a certain mordant, gymnastic cleverness" says the Washington Post), but Under The Frog is a peach. The title comes from the Hungarian notion of the worst place in the world to find yourself - down a coalmine, under a frog's arse.

The novel is a black comedy set in Hungary in the years immediately following the end of World War II and culminates in the 1956 uprising. Its protagonists are Gyuri, Pataki and several others, basketball players who dream of escaping their dead-end factory jobs, and perhaps even escaping dreary communist Hungary altogether. The book especially parodies the trumpeting of the "gains of socialism" by the regime, empty rhetoric which, Fischer suggests, all but the dimmest were able to see through even from the beginning.

It's faintly reminiscent of the best and funniest chapters in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. And the finest comedy I've read all year.