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The Curse of the Giant Hogweed (1984)

door Charlotte MacLeod

Reeksen: Peter Shandy (5), Balaclava-Reihe (05)

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2544104,327 (3.01)12
Chasing a vile English plant, Professor Peter Shandy and his friends go on a most peculiar trip The giant hogweed, a creeping menace known for crushing the life out of any plant foolish enough to get in its way, has put the hedgerows and pastures of the English countryside in jeopardy. Fishermen find their streams clogged, young lovers are caught with rashes in embarrassing places, and the English nudist colony has been all but exterminated. Only Peter Shandy, the famed horticulturalist responsible for the world's finest rutabaga, can save the day. But when Shandy and his colleagues set out to find hogweed samples, they stumble into an unusually mystical adventure.   Quite by accident, Shandy trips through a publican's portal, and finds himself conversing with a giant. Trapped in a land of castles, wizards, and knights, Shandy must use every scrap of his horticultural genius to get back home--lest the hogweed triumph in his absence.… (meer)
  1. 10
    A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court door Mark Twain (prosfilaes)
    prosfilaes: The classic story of modern people falling back to a medieval world
  2. 00
    The Woods Out Back door R. A. Salvatore (prosfilaes)
    prosfilaes: A superior story of the modern adult falling down the rabbit hole
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Toon 4 van 4
w.t.f.
  fernandie | Sep 15, 2022 |
Truly weird - even for Macleod's Shandy series. The main characters fall randomly into a magical, cursed world in a dream like way with no real explanation and back out again afterwards.... Very very strange. ( )
  Jennie_103 | Mar 10, 2013 |
The Curse of the Giant Hogweed is my favorite Peter Shandy book. I love the late Ms. MacLeod's send-up of fairy tales and old-fashioned fantasies! Professors Shandy, Ames, and Stott are in England, near the border of Wales, to help deal with an overgrowth of the giant hogweed. Leaving Helen Shandy and Iduna Stott to enjoy themselves in Merry Olde, the guys cross over into Wales. They enter an empty pub that's really old.

At this point what happens may just be Peter's dream, not unlike Alice's dream about Wonderland. If you want to, you may consider it a genuine adventure in some alternate dimension. Shandy finds himself in a never-logged forest. He's wearing nothing but what he considers a bedsheet and buskins. First he meets a woeful young giant of a hero named Torchyld who has been falsely accused of causing his great-uncle King Sfyn's cherished pet griffin to vanish. They run into Ames and Stott. Well before this adventure is over our esteemed professors are known as Archdruid Timothy Ames, Assistant Archdruid Daniel Stott, and Boss Bard Peter Shandy.

Another hint that this is all just a dream is that the giant hogweed is present in this past even though it was apparently introduced to Britain in the 19th century. The nasty anachronism proceeds to herd our heroes into a harrowing adventure inside a cave. If this is Shandy's dream, perhaps his subconscious remembers information that Stott provides, such as the identity of Cerridwen and what happens in fairytale and fantasy books Stott's sister, Matilda, provided for his eight offspring when they were little. Does Ames really have an Aunt Winona to whose old sitz bath he compares the coracle that shows up when they need it?

They do indeed introduce much-needed soap to the inhabitants of Lord Ysgard's castle, once Shandy and Ames' experiments to recreate Hilda Horsefall's old recipe succeed. There's treachery, evil, love, and murder in store, not to mention plenty of laughs and chuckles on the way, before good triumphs and evil is punished. Can Shandy teach Torchyld not to be so ready to believe in enchantments that are nothing of the sort? Will the giant horseweed be similarly vanquished?

Notes: I just checked to see if the giant hogweed is real, and it is. This novel doesn't mention one of the problems with the pest: its sap can cause temporary or permanent blindness. If you live in the USA, you might want to check a map to see if your state has been infested. So far mine hasn't, thank God.

Also just looked up "ye" which is both a singular and plural "you" and an archiac spelling of "the". Hadn't known that was correct.

The uncredited paperback cover with a rabbit trying to escape a skull made of giant hogweed at least makes imaginative use of the skull motif for a murder mystery. It also combines realism with fantasy, which fits this novel.

I particularly recommend The Curse of the Giant Hogweed to mystery & fantasy fans who enjoy parodies. ( )
  JalenV | Dec 21, 2011 |
This book left me shaking my head. It is, at best, a weak mystery, combined with a weak fantasy, where Peter Shandy, Dan Stott and Timothy Ames wander through a bizarre medieval-esque Wales unprecedented in history or literature, with frequent references to the plot-driven properties of fantasies like Oz or Alice in Wonderland. Inhabitants of this world speak a language that uses ye as both "the" and "you", splattered with Scottishisms and the occasional Welsh word tossed in where it will be unambiguous, which MacLeod makes us work through throughout the book; no one seems to notice the fact that Shandy and friends are speaking modern English. Shandy and friends are of course competent at everything, offering marriage services, bardic skills and new inventions to an always accepting audience. The nadir of this is where Professor Shandy teaches someone who has a sword about bows, which showed up in Europe before 3,300 BC.

MacLeod is a good author, and manages to make a story out of all this. If you're looking for a volume where modern people fall into an ill-defined fantasy world and blunder their way around, well there's a lot better than this, but there's also a lot worse. ( )
1 stem prosfilaes | Jun 22, 2008 |
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For Robert John Guttke
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Peter stopped to get a whiff of fresh air and a squint at the country outside. Maybe this was the direction they'd come from. He couldn't tell; all he could see was that seemingly endless ring of dark green forest beyond the open plain and the moat. Full of unicorns and heffalumps, no doubt. Why shouldn't he believe in mythical monsters, considering he'd become so recently acquainted with his first griffin?
Not a bad critter, either. He wondered what Jane Austen, the family cat back in the little brick house on the Crescent, would think of sharing her kitty box with a grifflet. Not much, he suspected. Like most females, Jane had a well-developed sense of the territorial imperative.
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Chasing a vile English plant, Professor Peter Shandy and his friends go on a most peculiar trip The giant hogweed, a creeping menace known for crushing the life out of any plant foolish enough to get in its way, has put the hedgerows and pastures of the English countryside in jeopardy. Fishermen find their streams clogged, young lovers are caught with rashes in embarrassing places, and the English nudist colony has been all but exterminated. Only Peter Shandy, the famed horticulturalist responsible for the world's finest rutabaga, can save the day. But when Shandy and his colleagues set out to find hogweed samples, they stumble into an unusually mystical adventure.   Quite by accident, Shandy trips through a publican's portal, and finds himself conversing with a giant. Trapped in a land of castles, wizards, and knights, Shandy must use every scrap of his horticultural genius to get back home--lest the hogweed triumph in his absence.

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