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Literary Review
ENDPAPER
Erudite lunacy
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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In Jasper Fforde’s parallel literary universe, a bibliophile’s seminal dream comes true.
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Effervescent: Jasper Fforde’s first novel was rejected 76 times.
A villain named Acheron Hades has entered Jane Eyre and kidnapped its protagonist. Using a Prose Portal, a detective named Thursday Next jumps into the book, giving chase. Meanwhile, characters from Jane Eyre escape from the book into the real world.
Whose erudite literary lunacy am I talking about here? Jasper Fforde, of course! If you’re not already a fan of the Thursday Next series, welcome to the parallel literary universe of author Jasper Fforde where that seminal dream of every bibliophile — the desire to step into the universe of a favourite book — comes true.
To this literary fantasy, Fforde adds a new dimension: fictional creations are able to escape into the real world. In the bookish universe created by him (The Eyre Affair, Lost In a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels), literature has become central to everyone’s life.
Books are fun
In Jasper Fforde’s Britain, books are more fun than television and sports; more vital than food and diet. People on the street furiously debate the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Vending machines named Will Speak dispense speeches from the Bard for a small fee. Bookworms are bio-engineered. Book cops do battle with philistine bibliophobes. Syntax-slaughtering grammasites run amuck inside classics. LiteraTecs, a literary detective squad, monitors book crimes. Classic works of literature are turned into reality book shows — Pride and Prejudice becomes “The Bennets”. And a giant philistine corporation is turning the world of books into theme parks for tourists.
The Eyre Affair, the first Thursday Next novel, was rejected 76 times before Penguin snapped it up. Like the alternative universes in his books, his work crosses many genres: mystery, fantasy, science fiction, meta-fiction. Thursday, a woman in her mid-thirties, lives with her pet dodo, Pickwick, and is a literary detective in the real world who finds herself immersed in this bizarre ‘bookworld’.
In The Eyre Affair, Thursday Next is forced to alter the ending of Jane Eyre! The Thursday Next series, points out the author, is full of book references and recognisable characters from famous books, and is not only an amusing and irreverent romp through the classics, but also a celebration of storytelling itself. Isn’t the idea that a reader can enter a book, interact with characters and even change the ending every booklover’s deepest wish?
In a recent interview, Fforde characterised his work this way: “Imagine that books are not hard immutable objects but actually an immensely complex story-telling technology, and the characters within them only actors playing the parts for your entertainment — that as soon as you close the covers of the book you are reading, they all relax and carry on their own lives, ready to spring into action as soon as you pick up the book again. This is true of all books, classics and romantic fiction, bad science fiction to Shakespeare. And when these characters are not working and off duty they have lives, hobbies and problems just like the rest of us.” That characters have lives of their own to live after we shut a book is the delightful premise that Fforde works with.
Extras
His books come with DVD-like extras: deleted scenes, the making of, and many special features. How could a book, you ask, possibly contain this? The extras are stored in Fforde’s richly imagined and very expansive website where a password (usually the name of a character from the book in question) usually leads you to all these added DVD-like features. Other kinds of inter-textual whimsy run riot through his books: the endpapers carry bookplates, illustrations, and even advertisements (holiday character-exchange programmes: Rhet Butler and Scarlett inviting you to Tara for the weekend). Jurisfiction Unit is a policing agency within the BookWorld that advertises for readers wishing to be inside books. In The Well of Lost Plots, Thursday Next is a pregnant single mother hiding inside the plots of unpublished novels! This unusual but snug refuge is threatened when the authorities decide to control the number of plots.
When this book was presented at the Guardian Hay festival, the festival director said the book “has the true Wodehousian joy of brilliant verbal playfulness, and seems genuinely and outrageously original. It’s a happy marriage of delightful intelligence and complete lunacy”.
Fforde’s plots contain more bibliophile japery: Hamlet has disappeared from his play in “Something Rotten”. To save her lover, Thursday must chase after an enemy inside Poe’s poem “The Raven”. Readers must watch out for PageRunners — “the name given to describe any character that is out of his or her book and moves through the backstory (or more rarely the plot) of another book.”
No wonder a critic referred to the Thursday Next series as “a hitchhiker’s guide to the library’. Jasper Fforde’s imagination is effervescent and bottomless, and I can’t wait to see what he’ll try next.
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