Relatively Speaking

This is the third in the series ‘The Adventures of the Flubb’, following on from ‘The Evolution of the Flubb’ and ‘The Flubb Investigates’. In the first book we saw the development out of nothingness of the Flubb, a strange creature with a taste for words and a craving for porridge. At the end of that book, after many bizarre adventures, he had found his niche as an assistant lexicographer, functioning as ‘word-taster’ on an unusual dictionary project. In the second volume, the Flubb found himself hired by Scotland Yard to ‘taste’ the veracity of an ambiguous suicide letter that had fallen into their hands in connection with a suspected murder case. He ended up chasing the words that escaped from the letter all across England before recapturing them and bringing his difficult task to a conclusion. In the present book he has grown restless again, and decides he must renew his search for his lost relatives, spurred on by an interest in Relativity (which he has recently read about). This takes him to Greenland, for he has also come across certain articles about the mysterious pre-Inuit ‘Dorset’ people of Greenland. The only clue he has is an old newspaper cutting with a picture of of a certain Watt What and his offspring from Dorset in whom he detects a certain family resemblance to himself. Now he is excited to learn that archaeologists think the lost Dorset people may be identical with the legendary ‘Tunit’ of the Greenlanders. These are supposedly giants who live under the Inland Ice – which is now melting at an alarming rate thanks to global warming. To get under the ice he teams up in Jakobshavn with a not very likable Cambridge glaciologist who has been measuring melt water outflow from the Greenland glaciers for years...