Adventures In A Good Book
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Do you like quirky yet witty (ie: British) humor? Puns? Classic English literature? Doctor Who and Douglas Adams? I think Jasper Fforde might be for you, specifically his Thursday Next series of books.
I have a degree in English literature and composition and am reasonably well-read, so I like to think I’m “qualified” to understand this series of books. And yet, while I enjoy them immensely, I nevertheless suspect that I’m missing a great many of the references and jokes. I guess I’ll just have to re-read them (again) and try harder this time.
Warning: minor spoilers ahead.
This series is difficult to quantify, summarize, or explain, but I’ll give it a whirl. It’s set in Great Britain in an alternate history version of our world. The Crimean war is still going on, although with the advent of modern artillery, there’s nothing left of the actual land except graveyards, minefields, and shell craters. Wales is a separate country, and the taxes on cheese exceed the actual price many times over. The laws of physics do still exist but not quite in the same way as in our world; time travel exists, for example. And fictional characters can come out of books into the real world, while real people can (and sometimes do) step into books. For anyone who has ever wanted to truly lose themselves in their favorite novel, this is a dream come true.
The story is told from the point of view of our protagonist, Thursday Next. She is a veteran of the Crimean war herself (and from certain points of view, a war hero) and now works for the Special Operations Network, mostly referred to as SpecOps. There are multiple departments in SpecOps, and Thursday works for SO-27, the Literary Detectives, who, as Thursday explains, “arrested the gang who were stealing and selling Samuel Johnson first editions; on another occasion we uncovered an attempt to authenticate a flagrantly unrealistic version of Shakespeare’s lost work, Cardenio. Fun while it lasted, but only small islands of excitement among the ocean of day-to-day mundanities that is SO-27: We spent most of our time dealing with illegal traders, copyright infringements and fraud.” (The Eyre Affair) Also present throughout the books is the villainous and ubiquitous Goliath Corporation, which has inserted itself into every part of British life, from government to entertainment to the military to law enforcement. They are not a benign institution.
In the first book (The Eyre Affair), Thursday is in pursuit of master criminal Acheron Hades who has stolen the original manuscript of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, and she also has opportunity to interact with characters and plot lines from Jane Eyre. She also has to sort out her love life, which she manages to do at the end of the first book. The first book definitely feels like it stands alone, but the next two leave plot lines open for subsequent books.
The second novel (Lost In A Good Book) picks up where the first book ended but very early on, Thursday’s husband Landon is “eradicated” right after Thursday discovers that she is pregnant. Eradication is a term used when SpecOps Chronoguard agents remove someone from the timeline. In this case, only Thursday remembers her husband, and she spends much of the book trying to get him back. She also is introduced to the world inside books and assigned as apprentice to Miss Havisham, where she is assured, “Why, by the time Miss Havisham has finished with you, you’ll think nothing of being able to visit early drafts, deleted characters or long-discarded chapters that make little or no sense at all. Who knows, you may even glimpse the core of the book, the central nub of energy that binds a novel together.” This is the novel where Thursday learns to move in and out of books on her own, an utterly delightful concept. At the end of the book, Thursday has not managed to recover her husband and she decides to take refuge inside an unpublished novel while she hides from the Goliath corporation and brings her pregnancy to term.
In the third novel (The Well Of Lost Plots), Thursday works in the book world as an agent of Jurisfiction, apprehending page runners (characters who, for various reasons, flee their own narrative into other books and occasionally into the real world), fighting grammasites (grammar-sucking parasites), evading The Questing Beast, and thwarting a book world conspiracy that might (definitely would) ruin books and fiction forever. Multiple new characters are introduced, most of them fictional, and all of them delightful. Also, Thursday hosts two “Generics,” characters who will someday belong to a book, but at the beginning, have no distinguishing characteristics. They study for their future roles at St. Tabularasa (another delightful reference) and practice their new skills while living with Thursday. Additionally, Thursday’s memories of Landon, her eradicated husband and the father of her child, are slowly fading, and if she forgets him, he will be truly gone. Granny Next comes to stay with her in the book world to help her remember. The eventual discovery of the true identity of Granny Next is both surprising and (in retrospect) completely obvious (like the killer in a good murder mystery). Again, by the end of this book, Thursday has not managed to recover her husband, although she does remember him clearly.
The fourth book (Something Rotten), which I like to consider the ending of the series, has Thursday, weary of living and working in fiction, returning to the real world with her son (who speaks only in Lorem Ipsum), accompanied by Hamlet, who wants to see the real world. Again, lots of Fforde shenanigans ensue, but Thursday does eventually recover her husband, while being hunted by an assassin known as the “WindowMaker” (“The printers made a mistake on the notepaper, and it would have cost too much to redo.”). Some characters from the book world visit her to plead for her return to sort out fictional chaos, citing as an example that in the absence of the main character, Hamlet has merged with the Merry Wives Of Windsor in a play now called The Merry Wives Of Elsinore, which is much inferior to either of the original plays (“It takes a long time to get funny, and, when it finally does, everyone dies.”). Thursday is reunited with her husband, saves the world, briefly visits the underworld, and fails to wean her son off of Lorem Ipsum.
There are seven novels total, and they are sort of broken up into two series. As Wikipedia explains: “The first series is made up of the novels The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Rotten. The second series is so far made up of First Among Sequels, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, and The Woman Who Died a Lot.” I would agree with Wikipedia that the novels do sort of sort themselves out into two series, and I confess, I really only enjoyed the first series, although I have read all seven novels. It’s only the first four that I find myself re-reading. And as the audio books are beautifully performed, I find myself re-listening to them regularly as well.
My bibliophile friend, who I often consult when writing book reviews for the blog, does not like this series. When I asked why, she thought about it, shrugged, and said, “It always feels like it’s sniggering at itself.” I can’t disagree with her there, but for the most part, I find myself sniggering along, even when the books get a little too self-referential. And although the books are wildly quirky, occasionally edging into surreal, they are also full of heart. There is much to enjoy. Give the first book a try, and see if you don’t want to ride along with Thursday into the world of fiction…just don’t let Miss Havisham drive.
