Untitled Document
Book lovers, if you haven’t already discovered
Jasper Fforde, don’t. Danger: addiction. Where else will you find
Thursday Next, a literary detective who can jump into books and save the
world for Reading? In this latest Next novel there are actually three
Thursdays, the “real” one (the quotes are for you), who lives
in the Outland, and the Thursdays who’ve appeared in the novels
written about her exploits, Thursday 1-4, who is violent, sexy,
foulmouthed, and basically evil, and Thursday 5, a namby-pamby New Agey
dweeb written as an antidote to Thursday 1-4. She stars in The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco but continually fails with her chai tea and lotus position, rendering Fiasco unloved and
unread. The Outland Read-O-Meter is dropping dramatically as Outlanders
quit reading. DVDs, video games, and coffeehouses take over; in a bookstore
one can scarcely find a rack of books. The formerly reading public is now
addicted to reality TV. BookWorld is understandably alarmed. Thursday is currently out to save Pride and Prejudice, as well as the
whole Austen collection, from becoming Reality-Book-TV, where viewers watch
a task set for the Bennets, then decide which of the characters should go
as the show moves on to the next task and chapter. Mr. Bennet, refusing to
cooperate, retires to his study, but Lydia thinks it will all be great fun.
The Outland’s giant corporation, Goliath (which has also learned to
bookjump, a skill explained later in this review), is perfecting a tourist
bus, the Austen Rover, which will take 20 passengers (for a fee) on a tour
of Austen country to gawk at Pemberley, gather autographs, and generally
become nuisances within the text. In BookWorld one can leap from genre to genre if one
has the skill or else take an intergenre taxi, often dangerous —
going through Poetry is especially hazardous. Also, the juxtaposition of
Racy Novel between Ecclesiastical and Feminist is causing problems. Changes
are abrupt — one jumps from an ethics lecture on Moral Dilemmas
(unpublished, in the Sea of Lost Texts) to “The Wreck of the
Hesperus” when actually heading for “dark and stormy
night.” Mrs. Tiggywinkle, a major gumshoe on the BookWorld detective
force, works with King Pellinore; they’re investigating how all the
rollicking humor got subtracted from Hardy. The
Lord of the Rings is in the shop, being
refitted, as a result of wear and tear; Harry Potter absents himself from a
meeting because of copyright problems; Sherlock Holmes doesn’t return
from the Reichenbach Falls, so the rest of the series is in danger of
erasure. One visits, briefly, Oral Tradition (vague), Geppetto’s
kitchen, the Ormond Hotel, elsewhere. The more widely read you are in all
genres, the more fun you’ll have with Thursday’s alightings and
the hilarious allusions. A fairly straightforward quote: “Last
year’s BookCon decision to lift the restriction on Abstract Concepts
attending as delegates opened the floodgates to a multitude of Literary
Theories and Grammatical Conventions who spent most of the time
pontificating loftily and causing trouble in the bar, where fights broke
out at the drop of a participle. When Poststructuralism got into a fight
with Classicism they were all banned, something that upset the Subjunctives
no end . . .”
Listen, this book is impossible to review. If it
sounds muddled, so be it. Read for yourself.
Jacqueline Jackson, books and poetry editor of Illinois Times, is a professor emerita of English at the University of
Illinois at Springfield.
This article appears in Jun 5-11, 2008.
