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12 May, 2003 - Imagine an alternative past and you are in the year 1985 in England. But this is an England that has endured a German occupation in the 1940s. This is a world where there are no jetliners, only airships, which are basically dirigibles, and subject to the weather. For public transportation, instead of the Tube, there is a monorail system called the Skyrail that uses Neanderthals as drivers. The Neanderthals, like dodos (a popular pet in this scenario) and other extinct creatures, have been brought back through DNA reverse engineering. Watching the semi-annual migrations of the mammoths is a popular past-time. Much of everything seems to be run by a giant multinational corporation, of the malignant sort, called Goliath. Instead of promulgating that man go to the moon, American President John Kennedy embarked on the project of creating the fastest form of mass transportation known to man, the Gravitube. The Gravitube can whizz you from London to Sydney (or New York to Tokyo) in forty-five minutes, rocketing you through the Earth's core. The sensation of zero gravity as you pass the center of the Earth is intoxicating.Now imagine, let go and suspend disbelief with me, that Monty Python's Terry Gilliam had contributed his wit and wisdom to creating Lara Croft and that rather than making her an adventurous archaeologist, he had made her a feisty Literary Detective comfortable with time travel, thanks to her non-existent but very real father who was a renegade from the time traveling ChronoGuard (a department of Special Operations - one of over thirty departments that police everything in life, including themselves.) Her name is Thursday Next, our heroine, and she is a veteran of the recent Crimean War, as is her husband. She has a special talent for "book jumping", which is going inside the narrative of books as one might enter a dream. This thanks to her uncle Mycroft, an inventive genius, who has created the Prose Portal. But Mycroft leaves us in Lost in a Good Book (Viking/Penguin 2003 -ISBN Q-670-03109-9) in order to convince Sherlock Holmes that he is his brother.
It's a daunting task attempting to review the second in a series of novels not having read the first. The first in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series was The Eyre Affair which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, quite deservedly if it was half the romp that Lost in a Good Book affords. The latter is a bibliophile's dream of tart wit, puns, good humor and page-turning suspense. Thursday Next is a ripe character capable of bitch-slapping a goon-like corporate bodyguard as well as appreciating the crochet of an old granny and the traditional charms of hearth and home. Fforde, who left behind a career in film to move to Wales and devote himself to writing, has a cunning knack for irony and the imagination of H.G. Welles. He has created a complete alternative universe for Thursday Next that most readers will be pleased to visit for some time. This is not Dostoiyevsky mind you, but important issues about life, the nature of time and space, loyalty and accomplishment are addressed in Fforde's pages. He does so not ponderously, but in a tongue-in-cheek mix of clever exposition and "pseudoscientific psychobabble" as he has Thursday say in the climactic scene of this novel.
In Lost in a Good Book, Thursday goes from being a simple Literary Detective, a job which includes authenticating a newly discovered Shakespeare manuscript, to being apprenticed to Miss Havisham of Great Expectation to train to be a Prose Resource Operative for Jurisfiction, the organization of people and "characters" who police the literary world.
"But Miss Havisham isn't real," you're thinking. Quite so, in this universe. But in Fforde's alternative universe, text and characters can be quite real, if you have the knack for book-jumping. They can even save your life. Fforde has crystallized what most fiction writers have felt for years: in writing a novel you live with your characters and they become as real to you in the experience as your wife making coffee in the next room or you buddy coming over to cadge a fiver.
That's part of the joy and beauty of reading this masterful and inventive work.
Fforde plans to bring out the third in the series, to be entitled The Well of Lost Plots in the spring of 2004, so this, like the Harry Potter series, will be around for readers to enjoy for years to come. It's a rollicking good and complex universe that Fforde has created for us to explore with Thursday Next and the potential for fun seems limitless.
As the New York Times Book Review wrote upon the release of the first in this series, "Fforde delivers almost every sentence with a sly wink, and he's got an easy way with wordplay, trivia and inside jokes"
There's something here for almost everyone who has ever loved books, from the literary allusions and off-handed critique's our Literary Detective gives of works from Spencer to Beatrix Potter to the details of chasing Grammasites (parasitical beasts who strip books of adjectives, verbs, etc.) Choosing the detective genre, one which has been most popular among readers for over a century, Fforde allows himself to spice his observations with danger and suspense.
In a scene I found particularly engaging, Miss Havisham takes Thursday to a book sale in Swindon. Because of a long-standing feud between Miss Havisham and the Red Queen, Thursday must collect a boxed set of books for Miss H. before the Red Queen can acquire same. Listen:
I turned and crawled rapidly across the carpet, climbed over the Police Procedurals to just beyond the registers, where the sales assistants rang in the bargains with a fervor bordering on messianic. I crept past them, through the empty returns department, and dived under the Chicklit table to emerge a scant two yards from the Daphne Farquitt special editions display; by a miracle no one had yet grabbed the boxed set. And it was very discounted - down from [Pound symbol]300 to only [Pound symbol]50. I looked to my left and could see the Red Queen fighting her way through the crowd. She caught my eye and dared me try and beat her. I took a deep breath and waded into the swirling maelstrom of popular-prose-induced violence. Almost instantly I was punched on the jaw and thumped in the kidneys; I cried out in pain and quickly withdrew. I met a woman next to the J.G. Farrell section who has a nasty cut above her eye; she told me in a concussed manner that the Major Archer character appeared in both Troubles and The Singapore Grip. I glanced to where the Red Queen was cutting a swath through the crowd, knocking people aside in her bid to beat me. She smiled triumphantly as she head-butted a woman who had tried to poke her in the eye with a silver-plated bookmark. I took a step forward to join the fray, then stopped, considered my condition for a moment and decided that perhaps pregnant women shouldn't get involved in bookshop brawlsThe very idea of a brawl over books warms the cockels of this old wordsmith's heart! I think that you'll learn to love Thursday Next and her family, who are featured prominently in this book, and even get to like the imperious, man-hating Miss Havisham.
It's an odd alternative past that Thursday inhabits, but one I suspect you'll want to visit more than once. She's entertaining enough to take to the beach, but thoughtful enough for a good read by the fireside in your favorite chair. G21 recommends you get to know her by getting lost in a good book. If the point of reading a book review is to make a decision whether to buy or not, Bibliophile, I suggest you buy.
© 2003, GENERATOR 21.
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