The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm

After last week, some lighter fare was in order, and The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm delivers exactly what sets out to.

The Professor is a somewhat odd character; he primarily invents things, though on occasion he gives lectures. He's terribly absent-minded, and, for example, wears five pairs of glasses at all times (one for reading, one for writing, one for outdoors, one for looking at you over the top of, and one to look for the other pairs when he's misplaced them).

"He fumbled in his pockets, and then remembered he had left his matches on the bedroom candlestick. 'Tut, tut,' he said, 'what a nuisance.' Then remembering that his memory wasn't very good, he fumbled around a bit more and found he hadn't left them on the candlestick after all. They were in the lining of his waistcoat."

The adventures themselves are fairly varied. In the first, the Professor and his friend, Colonel Dedshott travel back in time using a machine of the Professor's invention to revisit a party the Colonel had once attended, but they overshoot and wind up in the middle of a war instead. Not one to not take things in stride, they decide to join in, and together kill pretty much everyone involved; excepting a few rebels who'd been hiding, who assume the Professor and Colonel had been on their side, and them dual presidents for winning the war. Needless to say, the war was supposed to have been won in an entirely different fashion (by the opposing side, no less), which causes untold havoc for the history book writers.

Other adventures are slightly less action-packed; the professor loses some library books, does some spring cleaning, and goes on a beach vacation. Even these still have their moments, but aren't the best of the lot.

With regards to the book itself, the writing, and particularly the narrator, is a bit strange at times, often breaking the fourth wall:

... an awful misshapen white sort of thing with squiggly blue marks all over it. Just like a severely enlarged grocer's bill, which is what it actually was, only you're not supposed to know yet.

or just relating things in a very strange sort of way:

On and on they whirled, and nothing happened. And it kept on happening over and over again, till everything was so nothing that neither of them could notice anything.

... he was going along in a nicely cushioned boat on a river of warm cocoa, accompanied by Colonel Dedshott, who was rowing with a frying pan and a cricket bat, and Mrs Flittersnoop dressed in a currant pastry of her own making; while tame fractions cancelled each other out with subtraction signs and well-behaved multiplication sums sang oboe quartets at them.

"It was like a machine gun but much more sploshy."

Regardless, if you're looking for an entertaining read, with no fewer than three houses being blown apart, look no further than The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm.