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 Taking a bit part in Jasper fforde's unpublished detective novel Cavendish Heights via the Character Exchange Programme, she is hoping for a quiet life, but soon finds herself drawn into Jurisfiction politics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.