The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde

Read in the Hodder and Stoughton hardback edition.

This represents a return to fform ffor Fforde, after the disappointing “One of Our Thursdays is Missing”. The seventh in the Thursday Next series, eighth if you count “The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco”, sees Thursday recovering from injuries sustained in a kidnapping attack, and feeling her age. Offered a post in the Wessex Library Service we spend around 75 pages catching up on life in 1980’s Swindon, during which I was a little worried that the inventiveness of earlier books remained missing. But the scene setting is worth the time, because the book kicks in with a puzzling attack on Thursday’s family which is clearly the work of Aornis Hades, Thursday’s nemisis. From there the action never flags.

The span of the novel plays out over a week in which a lot happens in Thursday’s life. God has decided to cut out all the potential confusion about his existence, and make himself apparent to man. Mankind seems to have taken this in his stride, even when God gets a bit truculent and starts smiting some cities out of existence, downtown Swindon being next in line. So there’s that to sort out, as well as Thursday’s new job in the library service, investigating mysterious attacks on book collections by Goliath, her other nemises, if global corporations can be nemises, and indeed if the plural of nemesis is nemises. Her brother Joffy is now in effect mankind’s chief negotiator with God over the difficult “meaning of life” question. Aornis has escaped, and needs tracking down. And the lives of her children get more complicated as the grow up – Friday is due to murder someone at the end of the week, Tuesday (keep up there) is investigating how to deflect God’s wrath via an anti-smiting device, and Jenny doesn’t exist.

How Fforde keeps all these balls in the air, adding in jokes about Dark Matter (setting up the next book in the series nicely) and a range of wacky ideas about time travel, avatars, parallel worlds (thrown in and lightly thrown away) and of course the Book World, is hard to describe, but he does, masterfully.

The acid test of a good read is if you don’t want it to stop. I read this in a couple of days flat, and didn’t even notice that it was over 350 pages (just checked) – whereas Wolf Hall (for example) was on a slow countdown. I know that probably makes me a sucker for light comic fantasy (and a good dodo joke) – guilty as charged.

One of our Thursdays is Missing – Jasper Fforde

The law of diminishing returns is setting in for this series. Fforde keeps delivering his linguistic pyrotechnics, clever plot twists, and his imaginative recasting of the world of fiction. And yet I can’t deny my interest is waning, and as a result I fear I will end up focussing on minor flaws which in early books in the series – and the seventh is coming out later in the year – were more easily over-looked.

This admittedly jaundiced view is not helped by the choice of the “written” Thursday Next as the main protagonist – the real Thursday Next being missing, as the title suggests. Even writing that, and considering trying to draw a distinction between two different flavours of literary character being used here emphasises just how nonsensical that would be. The power of fiction is such that when we identify with a character, and that character is replaced, even if the replacement is a carbon copy of the original, we feel the loss. In any event the primary Thursday in this novel is not a carbon copy of the original, and we are constantly reminded of the fact – she is a more timid, reserved, version. Because the action of the book takes place almost exclusively within BookWorld, we are deprived of most if not all of the characters that have grown over the series. 

One other gripe – there are some jumps in the narrative, almost as if some paragraphs or pages are missing. One example where a puzzle is set – Thursday has to work it out to escape from an island of fan-fiction – and we are not given the answer. I understand this is because Fforde set his fans a series of puzzles on his website, which is where the answer to this and the other narrative discongruities can be found (such as who gives Thursday her Jurisfiction badge?) In the edition I read there was no signposting of this which meant that the book read as rushed and incomplete. Disappointing, but I don’t don’t I will be coming back for more with TN7.

P.S. Just one more moan – why the silly book titles? I was going to say puns, but there’s no punning going on, just the simple insertion of one word for the original. Doing this to a Jeffrey Archer was bad enough, but One of our Dinosaurs is Missing – really?

Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde

Something Rotten is the fourth in Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next” series. I am a big fan of Fforde – he has a comic inventiveness mixed with erudition that is rare in today’s literature. He is hard to categorise – comic fiction certainly, but that is only the start of it. In Thursday Next he has created an original character that you genuinely care about (if not identify with) and her separation from and eventual reunion with her husband is quite touching. So why was I left a bit underwhelmed at the end of this book?

I am pretty sure it is not because his standards are slipping. There are some negative features of a series of novels that are unavoidable – for example we know the principal character will almost certainly survive, no matter what – in this case a bullet to the head is shrugged off in a couple of chapters – so there is little if any tension about the final outcome. As we know what is going to happen, the only interest rests in how we get there, not where we are going. That’s not to say that there aren’t challenges ahead for Thursday in the rest of the series I am sure.

I think the heart of the problem is in the way I have been reading these books – that is, altogether, without any significant breaks. Imagine if you read all of the Harry Potter series in one go, not over the ten or so years they were published. The impact would have been completely different. The suspense would be seriously diminished, the changes in style and pace would be much more obvious, plot discrepancies would jump out at you, and the point at which Rowling’s editors gave up – at the end of “Prisoner” – would be stark. Even knowing that there were seven books in the series, and that it has a definition conclusion, would make the experience different to reading each as it was published (or in my case joining the party at 4 and working back, hurriedly). That experience would be hard but not impossible to create, but I think explains some of my staleness with Fforde. So the simple prescription is a break from this series – the only remaining question is – Where next?

The Well of Lost Plots, by Jasper Fforde

Today I finished the Well of Lost Plots, the third in the Thursday Next series. This is great fun – Fforde is respectful towards his far ranging sources, the central character is a strong resourceful woman and he throws ideas around with an energy that has drawn justifiable comparisons with Douglas Adams. Justifiable but we need to draw a clear line – Douglas Adams is a literary god, who if he had only left us the babelfish alone would have earned his place at the top table of writers – whereas Fforde has yet to break out of the niche he occupies. Perhaps a television series would earn him the audience he deserves – although how you would film some of his scenes escapes me. The obvious answer is a radio series – don’t tell me, they have already done one? My 16 year old son has been reading this series one book behind me, and has been enjoying them, although I flatter myself he probably hasn’t got all the literary references that Fforde throws in. Recommended if you are looking for something light, amusing, and clever, without taking itself too seriously.