Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots

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.

This was the last volume to be widely published
in the original cover style (this is not that style),
making it impossible for me to collect a matching
set without rebuying. I'm kind of glad I switched to
Kindle.

Moving swiftly on (thank you Kindle omnibus edition, even if you do make it a little more difficult to crossreference the footnoterphone conversations and scenes,) in The Well of Lost Plots Thursday is on the run from Goliath, and seeks sanctuary in the one place they can't find her: In fiction. Taking a bit part in Jasper fforde's unpublished detective novel Cavendish Heights via the Character Exchange Programme, she is hoping for a quiet life, but soon finds herself drawn into Jurisfiction politics surrounding the launch of UltraWord(TM), an entirely new reading technology. Moreover, she has a parting gift from Aornis to cope with, if she ever wants to see her still-nonexistent husband again.

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.

The Eyre Affair

I'm sure that car was originally described as being
painted with Escher lizards, but the Kindle version
is just stripey. I wonder if ebook technology has
finally allowed Text Grand Central to issue proper
rolling upgrades (as promised in print editions of
the Thursday Next series.)

In a world almost, but not quite entirely unlike ours, Thursday Next works for SO-27, the specialist branch of the police force that deals with crimes involving literary heritage. A veteran of the ongoing (in 1985) Crimean war, she is called upon to pursue infernal supervillain and former English Lit professor Acheron Hades when he steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and starts bumping off minor characters. When he turns his attention to Jane Eyre, Thursday knows that it is only a matter of time before England's cultural milieu is irreparably damaged. After all, everyone loves Jane Eyre (even if most of them do think it would be better if Jane and Rochester had married at the end.)

I first read The Eyre Affair in print... many years ago, and have since recommended it to various people, to the point of buying copies for two friends whom I thought would enjoy it. Coming back to it in a Kindle edition, I'm less wowed than I was back then. I still enjoyed it and the writing is still witty and pacy, but I suspect that novelty was a big part of its impact. Having moved on to the later books (I bought it in a three pack with Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots,) I find it to be a good start, but ultimately not as strong on its own as it was back then. This saddens me somewhat, although I;m finding the others good enough not to write off the entire canon based on a lukewarm re-reading.

As an aside, it's fascinating to read in ebook format a series which was originally written for purely print media and which postulated the advance of book technology to allow rolling updates and DVD-style special features; in short, something akin to an ebook, but with real pages.

This has been a brief review, I know, but I will probably add some additional thoughts after I wrap up The Well of Lost Plots.

The Sleeper and the Spindle

In a castle lies a maiden, plunged into a magical sleep, a sleep that also afflicts the rest of the castle's population, and that of the surrounding village. In fact, the sleeping plague is growing, for all that no-one actually recalls why or how it began. Soon another kingdom is threatened and a young Queen comes to see what can be done. Many princes have died trying to reach the maiden, but the Queen has fought magic before and her faithful dwarves are themselves magical. Perhaps she can wake the Sleeper.

Fairy tale retellings are pretty much ten a penny these days. Between Once Upon a Time and the Frozen juggernaut it's easy to dismiss yet another revisionist offering as derivative. To do so really misses the point that Neil Gaiman has been doing this for decades, but it is certainly the case that it's harder to do anything new in the field. In The Sleeper and the Spindle, Gaiman eschews entirely the traditional prince (almost no-one is named in the book, a fact commented on in the text, but the only prince isn't even capitalised and is deliberately referenced in the terms of a traditional damsel) in favour of his heroic Queen.

Essentially a grown up Snow White, the Queen is a stalwartly pragmatic figure, whose strength lies in understanding the romance of the story without being caught up in it. Her 'true love's kiss' is functional and her own romance practical; she is the fairy tale as process. The real twist of the tale lies in its damsel, however, giving us a Sleeping Beauty as different as Tanith Lee's Snow White, leaving Maleficent's alt-Aurora for dust.

The book is lavishly illustrated by Chris Riddell, which pretty much guarantees it my vote, even if it does mean I actually look at the Queen as an adult Ada Goth.

Runelight

The Old Gods have settled into life in the quiet village of Malbry, but the world is not done with them yet. Prophecy will out, wolves will rise and riders will ride; Carnage, Treachery and Lunacy astride steeds of fire, sea and air. Ragnarok is coming, again; even with the aid of a newly discovered twin, this time Maddy may not be able to cheat the immortal malevolence of the Whisperer, and the aid of her sister Maggie is not something to be counted on.

Joanne Harris's sequel to Runemarks ramps up the emotional hurt while maintaining a strong blend of modern irreverence and mythic resonance. At the core of the story is the idea of the language that makes the world, and in particular of the emergence of the new script to replace that which was crippled at Ragnarok.

Unfortunately, the increased focus on the shenanigans of the travelling gods - an unwieldy party consisting of seven Vanir, six Aesir, three wolves, a dodgy witch, a surly dwarf and Loki - detracts from the role of Maddy, the protagonist of Runemarks, leaving her to wander kind of lost through most of the book and failing to be either an effective soldier or a committed rebel. Maggie, meanwhile, is a poor substitute, a mystical powerhouse but the pawn of manipulative men pretty much throughout the story.

Runelight is not a bad book and has a lot to recommend it, but it isn't as strong and Runemarks by some way.