Thursday Next [series]

 Thursday Next [Series]

  - Jasper Fforde

 

Looking at the blurbs (which appeared too chaotic for my taste) and reviews (which were almost ecstatic), I switched several times on the decision whether to read this series or not. Well, I am glad that I eventually did, and ended up reading four of them in quick succession.

I would never have thought that I would like such a mish-mash of genres – literary thriller, fantasy, and to some extent, science fiction, but I loved it. If I have to describe it in one word (or two), what I would call it is “uniquely imaginative”. The novels are set in an alternate reality, where literature is more precious than jewels and special police departments are dedicated to literary crimes, technology is advanced enough to make cloning a household experiment and resurrect dodos as pets, and time travel is common but strictly regulated activity. One can move back and forth in time, and change the course of [current] reality, or slip sideways into an alternate reality. One can jump into a book and interact with characters, though it is a skill rare few can boast of. One can change a manuscript, and every copy of the book over the world would reflect the change. Entire museums are dedicated to an author, vote lobbies are created by preference to one author over another.

The world building is simply magnificent, of the “real” world, as well as the “book” world. It is teeming with literary references (I identified a number of them, even after possibly missing some), literary puns are scattered liberally, and has a lot of humor and charm. I particularly enjoyed the smaller Easter-egg kind, like why there is a difference in the spelling of words like colour and valour in US, how did Mycroft suddenly appear in Sherlock Holmes stories, enfranchising of King Solomon’s wisdom. It takes sarcasm at the government bureaucracy and the corporate operations and greed to the next level. Time travel and book travel are not novel concepts, but the way the author has used time travel is interesting, and the world he created around book jumping is simply ingenious. There seem to be inconsistencies caused by all the movement across time and place, but frankly, I was having too much fun to crib about it.

The first book – The Eyre Affair – is primarily created around Jane Eyre, and the fact that I haven’t read it did not deter my engagement with the book. I do not intend to read Jane Eyre, but someone who does, should be warned that it contains complete spoilers about the book. The one part I did not like in this one was the rather insipid love affair, even though I understood that it would play a key role in subsequent books.

In the sequel – Lost in a Good Book – the author describes book jumping as almost an art, which not everyone can possess, and anyone who does, must still hone it. The book world is a parallel universe, with its own rules and conventions and problems, and an entity that must govern it and keep the crimes at bay. The heroine, Thursday, develops her book jumping skills, and becomes an apprentice in jurisfiction (the judicial entity in the world of fiction; love the pun!), resulting in crazy adventures in both worlds.

The third book – The Well of Lost Plots – is almost entirely set in the book world, and I particularly liked the concept of a repository of unpublished works, the mechanics of creation of the published works, and the process of dismantling of rejected ones. The way the author has described the creation of generic characters and their shaping up, the incorporation of plot devices and plugging of plot holes is truly creative. However, the primary theme of the book, the conspiracy to take over all fiction writing and reading was over the top even for someone like me, who has been enjoying the crazily colorful worlds.

In the fourth book in the series – Something Rotten – Thursday returns to the more unpredictable, and therefore exciting, real world. But this is where, for me, the series starts to decline. The novelty of the worlds has worn off, and there were not much of new literary puns to enliven it. It was a mad caper of frantic action, jumping all over the place in time and between the two worlds. It progresses in terms of the story line, but does not grow conceptually. I am not giving up on the series yet, but will give it a rest for a while.