Thursday Next is feeling pretty good about herself. Not only has she married the love of her life with a baby on the way, but her career is going pretty well and she has successfully given the finger to the almighty Goliath Corporation. Sadly, Goliath does not take defeat well, and decide to blackmail her, with the very existence of her husband Landen as their bargaining chip. To make matters worse, her revision of the ending of Jane Eyre is coming under scrutiny from Jurisfiction, a police force which exists inside fiction, her memory is under attack, her life is continually imperiled by coincidence and, just to cap off a bad week, all life on Earth is about to be reduced to an unidentifiable goo.
So, yeah, there is a lot going on in Jasper fforde's sequel to The Eyre Affair. Coming back to the series, I'm struck by the fact that while the first book, while not bad, mostly had novelty going for it, Lost in a Good Book is a more assured work which stands better on its merits for a second reading. The eradication of Landen and the insidious threat of Aornis Hades are both genuinely disturbing devices, and despite only a couple of appearances, there is a genuine tragic nobility to the Neanderthals.
Lost in a Good Book also gives us the character of Miss Haversham. Most of the Jurisfiction agents are a delight, but Miss Havisham is the pip. Combining elements of her personality in Great Expectations with a gung ho, no nonsense attitude to policing, fforde creates something altogether wonderful, at the same time faithfully literary and more than the sum of her parts.
The Well of Lost Plots is the most solidly bookworldian of the first three Thursday Next books, and develops the high-concept of bookjumping with concepts including the inability of fictionals to detect scent, and unpronouncable words being easily spoken in a world where all sensory input and dialogue is actually text-based. This was my favourite of the three on first reading, and remains so; I am still in love with the concepts as much as anything, and it represents the work of a writer who is both fresh and matured.
So, yeah, there is a lot going on in Jasper fforde's sequel to The Eyre Affair. Coming back to the series, I'm struck by the fact that while the first book, while not bad, mostly had novelty going for it, Lost in a Good Book is a more assured work which stands better on its merits for a second reading. The eradication of Landen and the insidious threat of Aornis Hades are both genuinely disturbing devices, and despite only a couple of appearances, there is a genuine tragic nobility to the Neanderthals.
Lost in a Good Book also gives us the character of Miss Haversham. Most of the Jurisfiction agents are a delight, but Miss Havisham is the pip. Combining elements of her personality in Great Expectations with a gung ho, no nonsense attitude to policing, fforde creates something altogether wonderful, at the same time faithfully literary and more than the sum of her parts.
The Well of Lost Plots is the most solidly bookworldian of the first three Thursday Next books, and develops the high-concept of bookjumping with concepts including the inability of fictionals to detect scent, and unpronouncable words being easily spoken in a world where all sensory input and dialogue is actually text-based. This was my favourite of the three on first reading, and remains so; I am still in love with the concepts as much as anything, and it represents the work of a writer who is both fresh and matured.