The Amazing and Aggravating World of Jasper Fforde

by

Nicki Leone

 

I think author Jasper Fforde may have constructed his own literary version of a mirrored room in his ongoing (and ongoing and ongoing) “Thursday Next” series, which began with The Eyre Affair and has recently come back to life after four books and one spin-off series with his new novel, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels (Viking; $24.95). The series, set in an alternative England circa 1984-1999, features a young woman police detective in the “Literatec” Department, the division responsible for policing infractions against literature. Mostly, this meant rounding up fanatical “Baconites”—a  fundamentalist group that believed Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon—but occasionally she is assigned more dangerous duties, such as guarding the original manuscript of Jane Eyre when it comes under threat from a terrorist. For this is an England where literature holds the same kind of public devotion and attention that rock stars and movie celebrities do in our world. There are a few other differences as well. The Crimean War is still going on, as it has been for a hundred years. Wales is an independent socialist republic. Genetic cloning is common, but mostly used by folks to create pets modeled on extinct prehistoric animals. (Thursday herself has a Dodo she calls Pickwick). Oh, and time travel is possible, but strictly regulated by a special division of the police called The Chronoguard. There are also some things that are quite familiar—like the not-so-benevolent influence of a gigantic corporation called Goliath which bears not just a passing resemblance to Microsoft. This is the England we must assimilate when Thursday faces her first adventure, when a psychopath kidnaps Jane Eyre right out of the book and holds her for ransom.

Like many book  people, I was initially charmed by the literary universe Fforde created. I liked its wackiness and the endless puns and its irreverent affection for all of English literature. I was vain  enough to feel smug that I recognized the sources of most of the references, and had read most of the same books. I liked the endlessly inventive and satirical take on literature's tendency towards self-importance. A world where audiences respond to Shakespeare's Richard III the way that we do to The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a world I wish I lived in! And I especially liked the basic premise, which is that fiction has a physical, corporeal presence in our lives, that the characters of Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester, and Heathcliff are REAL, the way the velveteen bunny is real.

Five books later, I find I am not feeling charmed so much as trapped at a party with a guy who keeps telling endless versions of the same joke. (A horse and monkey and a duck walk into a bar . . .).  The Thursday Next series reels back and forth between the “real” world and the “book” world—which is the world created by fiction. Thursday holds down jobs in both worlds—as a Literatec in reality and a “Jurisfiction” agent in the book world. She spends most of her time trying to preserve the integrity of the classics from various disgruntled and disaffected elements, both real and fictional. Most of the humor in the stories comes from the natural absurdity created by treating abstract concepts as if they had a concrete existence, and concrete things as if they were only abstract concepts. In the opening paragraphs of the latest book, for example, we learn that there is something in the nature of an civic crisis in England because the Common Sense party currently in power  in the government has been living up to its name to such a degree that a surplus of unused “stupidity” has built up to dangerous levels, and threatens to burst out and overwhelm the country in a kind of environmental disaster of possibly biblical proportions. Whenever Fforde gets to a slow point in his book, he throws in another version of  this joke—using it like a shell game to distract the reader from the fact that the plot is currently chasing its tail.
 
Fforde writes satire, as in “trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly.” Satires take a flaw in our society and exaggerate it to such a ridiculous degree that we are forced to confront the effects of our own hubris.  Alas, Jasper Fforde makes endless fun of our society, but to very little point.  Reading his books is a little like taking a bite of cake and finding out it is all icing. Despite their amusement park-like atmosphere, despite the infinite opportunities to poke affectionate fun at all kinds of writing and all kinds of readers (“Poetry” observes Thursday in the latest book, “bypasses rational thought and foes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a bushfire. It’s the crack cocaine of the literary world”), Fforde’s books are about as empty of furniture as that mirrored room in my hometown art gallery.   

Plots, for example, are thin to the point of translucency and character development is nonexistent. The Thursday Next we meet in The Eyre Affair is essentially the same woman we meet in First Among Sequels (The title tells you exactly what the book is about), even though it has been at least 15 years and she now is married and has two kids. Fforde seems to delight in tossing in subplots and side plots and alternate plots and indulges in them with the same enthusiasm that he has scattering puns across the page. Resolutions (when he bothers) are often facile and unsatisfying. In fact, he often gets sidetracked into the highways and byways of in his own literary construct, shoving in extraneous, if hilarious, scenes as the mood takes him: anger management encounter groups among the characters in Wuthering Heights, or desperate chases after the thief who’s stealing all the humor out of Thomas Hardy. It is as if he can’t help himself—the books are a little Harry Potter-ish in that way.

But this is a world where the laws of physics don’t apply, and time is not exactly linear, so anything can be done, and undone. There is absolutely no point in describing what any of the books are about, because nothing that happens in them ever really matters The author uses time travel as a deus ex machina or get out of jail free card whenever he writes himself into a corner (something that pisses this Doctor Who fan off to no end). The end result is that many of the emotions that normally drive a story such as Thursday's grief over the “death” of her husband (in the second book of the series, Lost in a Good Book) become trivial. Most of the characters are not so much dead as out to lunch or taking a cigarette break.

What frustrates me the most about the Thursday Next series is that I think they are founded on a real love of the magic of literature. There isn’t a reader on the planet who hasn’t, at some point, imagined what the characters of their favorite novel did “off the page.” Fforde recognized that the great thing about fiction is that every story implies an entire universe. Oh, we may only “see” Thornfield Hall on the pages of Jane Eyre, but we are in no doubt that beyond Thornfield are the moors, and the expanse of England, and the breadth of an entire world. The author is, I think, somewhat in awe of the way that words on a page can create such a detailed and solid presence in our heads. As am I. As is any reader. “Reading, I had learned,” notes Thursday in more than one of the books, “was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise four ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work—the writer might have died long ago.”

It’s too bad that this sense of wonder and awe is buried under so many literary cheap shots. Fforde has taken the idea that literature is “real” and run with it. And run with it and run with it. But in the end, his story gets lost among all the other stories it crosses, and readers will find that at the end of the book they haven’t moved an inch. They are still in the same pretty, shiny room. It’s all been done with mirrors.
 


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She earned her B.A. in Russian and Middle Eastern History from Boston College, supporting her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore. Since then, she has been in and out of academic institutions, but has always managed to work with books no matter what. She began working for Bristol Books, an independent bookstore in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1993, and three years later became its manager, which is where she stayed for the next fifteen years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki is a book reviewer for several magazines, an occasional on-air book reviewer and commentator for the Wilmington public radio station WHQR, and a co-host on the television program “Let's Read” on UNCW. She is one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, an annual book festival for mystery readers and writers, and currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of three dogs and two cats. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it