Jasper Fforde

This is Thursday Next, better than ever. The plot is Fforde-level convoluted, which means you read and try not to think too hard because your brain might hurt, but you know that you like it because it's utterly brilliant.

In this book, Thursday is appointed to be the head of the Wessex Library System, and must deal with budgets while also dealing with the more mundane things of time travel paradoxes, a scheduled smiting from God, a mindworm of a daughter that never was, duplicate Thursdays, show more and yet another evil Goliath plot. show less

I love the central premise of this series: that there exists an alternative reality in which books are afforded a level of reverence typically reserved for Taylor Swift or international soccer clubs. In Fforde’s world, Baconians knock on your door hoping to “convert” you to their creed that Bacon wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare, children trade Henry Fielding bubblegum character cards, and drugstores are equipped Will-Speak machines in which Zoltar-like mannequins perform show more Shakespeare’s greatest hits for a coin. Other ‘altered realities’ – in Fforde’s reimagined world, England and Russia are engaged in a decades-old war over control of the Crimea; Wales is an independent republic; genetic engineering has restored Neanderthals and dodos from extinction; people travel via dirigibles; a labyrinthian organization named Special Ops (SO) tackles essential government functions, from enforcing cheese taxes to eliminating rogue supernatural creatures; and a shadowy non-governmental organization named Goliath Corp. seems to run pretty much everything else.

Enter Thursday Next, a respected but relatively low-level Special Ops operative in charge of investigating literary crimes – thefts, forgeries, whatnot. Until a series of events intervene, to include:

• A gleefully evil supervillain named Hades, in possession of technology that allows him to enter novels and interact with the characters, threatens to slaughter Martin Chuzzlewit unless he receives a huge ransom;
• Years of low-level conflict in the Crimea threaten to explode into full-scale bloodshed due to the imminent deployment of a new super-weapon (the Stonk Plasma-Rifle);
• Goliath agent Jack Schitt blackmails Thursday into helping him capture Hades so that Goliath can repurpose his prose portal to their own nefarious purposes;
• Thursday’s Uncle Mycroft, the genius inventor of the bookworm-powered Prose Portal, is kidnapped (and his wife Polly stranded in the text of Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud);
• Oh – and Next’s former lover, who she hasn’t seen in 10 years, reappears, triggering consternation.

In between visits from her father (a rogue SO-12 Chronoguard employee, able to move through time), infiltrating a gang of secretive scientists dedicated to intercepting incoming asteroids in catching mitts, collapsing temporal distortion with basketballs, shootouts with psychopathic, face-recycling henchmen, dispatching vampires, and preventing Goliath from plunging the country into a bloodbath, Thursday gradually comes to discover that the boundary between the book world and the “real” world is a lot more porous than she ever imagined. After Edward Rochester shows up to save her life, the book’s denouement features Thursday pursuing Hades into the text of Jane Eyre, a pursuit that inadvertently ends up altering the book’s ending.

As long as you’re capable of suspending your disbelief and accepting that Fforde’s world isn’t supposed to make any sense or abide by any sort of consistent rules, this is a terrific ride! Thursday’s a combination of Jason Bourne and Hermione Granger, which sounds odd but works, and the book is stuffed to the brim with preposterous characters, scathing social and political satire, Monty Python-type silliness, literary references, romance, time travel, monsters, anachronisms, tons of action (car chases, gun fights, Raphaelitist riots), punctuation humor (an underappreciated artform), and puns galore. Just don’t ask me what genre this is, because I wouldn’t even know where to start! show less

In this installment of the extremely unpredictable Thursday Next series, the titular protagonist is missing! At least, that is the suspicion of the actual protagonist, the written Thursday. After many years of portraying Thursday in print, the written Thursday barely knows her namesake, but receives a tip from a mysterious man on a train that something nefarious is going on.

Although her jurisfiction colleagues won't admit that Thursday is actually gone, no one is certain of where exactly she show more is. The written Thursday is soon on a semi-authorized investigation to discover the real Thursday's whereabouts before her presence is missed at an extremely important political meeting.

Along the way, the written Thursday will visit the real world, meet ghosts and villains, and enlist the help of countless bizarre allies in her pursuit of the real Thursday. But the more she investigates, the more she begins to wonder about her own identity. Is it possible that she's the real Thursday who has suffered some crippling accident that has rendered her delusional?

Okay, I'm saying it: this one might be too meta! Although I love Mr. Fforde's writing, this one was so insular and self-referential, I was occasionally lost. I think part of it is my general weariness around the Mystery genre, but I still enjoyed this journey enough to be fully satisfied. show less

Eddie Russett travels with his chromaticologist father (a doctor who treats patients by showing them swatches of particular colors) across the country to East Carmine, a semi-rural village where things are a bit weirder than Eddie is used to. He’s left behind his rich almost-half-fiancée Constance Oxblood but is confident he can earn some merits and do well on his eyesight exam and return to her. Throwing a wrench into his plans is Jane, a grey who can hardly see any color, who is show more beautiful, rebellious, and a stone-cold bitch (whom Eddie immediately falls in love with). Eddie gets wrapped up in the schemes of these people who don’t always follow the color hierarchy the way they’re supposed to. The high-color prefects are horribly corrupt, and the greys are smart and have rich (figuratively) lives, nothing really makes any sense, and the scales start to fall from his eyes. He can’t decide whether to go back to his old life or forge a new path outside of the color wheel, until he visits the abandoned city of High Saffron and learns things he can’t unknow.

This is almost a perfect, poignant dystopian story about authoritarianism, disability rights, and how fascists use complex social hierarchies to distract people from rising up against them, but it’s too chaotic and absurd for that. And yet, the chaos and absurdity somehow make it better than perfect. Nothing maps perfectly onto our world, nor any of the things that influence it, like the board game Risk or Albert Munsell (not really a horrible despot, as far as I can tell!). Everything is absurd, without real logic, and therefore there can be no gaps in logic.
My favorite absurdities:
-looking at a certain color green gets you high
-spoons are precious because they were left off the list of goods to manufacture
-librarians are deeply valued, but books keep getting banned to the point that there are more librarians than books
-for entertainment everyone listens to people tapping gossip or stories on the radiator pipes in morse code

I only have the smallest quibble with the story, which is the sense of time. The whole book takes place over 4 days, and several times there are 4 or 5 dramatic events in a row, and then everyone eats lunch. But the absurdity fills in all logic holes - maybe days in this world are much longer than ours?

Is this my favorite book ever? It might be. It just really tickles me in all the right ways. show less