Lost in a Good Book: A Thursday Next Novel

This novel has two problems to solve. One is a problem Thursday has. In The Eyre Affair Thursday killed Acheron Hades (the third most evil person on Earth -- numbers one and two have yet to be revealed to us) (of course we all know that in fantasy and science fiction no one is ever so dead that they can't come back) and trapped Goliath Corp mean person Jack S----- in a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. Goliath Corp wants him back, and has eradicated Thursday's new husband Landen to coerce her to get him out. ("Eradicated" means they rearranged the past in such a way that Landen no longer exists, although Thursday still has memories of him.)The second problem is a problem Jasper Fforde has. The premise of the Thursday Next series is that people can move from the real world into books, where they become characters. In The Eyre Affair this was accomplished mainly by means of a device, the Prose Portal, invented by Thursday's genius uncle Mycroft. Not wanting it to be exploited by Goliath, Mycroft at the end of The Eyre Affair destroyed the only Prose Portal he had built and retired, apparently vanishing from the face of the Earth.So, Fforde has now created for himself a little problem. He has eliminated access to the technology for getting people into and out of books. However, even in The Eyre Affair he hinted at another, low-tech way of accomplishing the feat. As a child Thursday, on a visit to Haworth House entered Jane Eyre at the point where Mr Rochester meets Jane. Also, in Jane Eyre she met a Mrs Nakajima from Osaka who made regular tourist excursions to the precincts of Jane Eyre. This low-tech method works just by reading the book. People with the gift can read themselves into a book just by reading its words. They can even take others with them.It is interesting that Cornelia Funke's Inkheart trilogy, which is based on the same premise, was published at about the same time as the Thursday Next series. (Inkheart: 2003, The Eyre Affair: 2001.) I doubt either author got the idea from the other. To any avid reader the idea that you can read yourself into a book, or can read characters from the book out into The Real World is obvious -- it is what we do all the time. I have visited Martin Arrowsmith in Winnemac and had casual conversations with Laura Ingalls since I was a kid.Fforde spends much of Lost in a Good Book creating an elaborate infrastructure for migrating into and out of books. Thursday has to learn how to work this magic and the elaborate organization Fforde creates to exploit it. All this at the same time as she is trying to get Landen back. The result, in my opinion, is a novel that is too complicated and unfocused for ordinary readers (by which I mean ME, of course) to keep their eyes on the ball at all time.But Lost in a Good Book still has all the things I loved in The Eyre Affair -- the literate alternative world, the literary in-jokes (although I'm not sure I understand above 20% of them). So, it is still fun, but not quite as fun as The Eyre Affair. My hope is that, now that Fforde has explicated the magic/technological infrastructure, we will be able to just exploit it in the sequels. Thus, I intend to continue.

Thursday Next is now a celebrity after her successful trip inside the novel "Jane Eyre" to rescue and re-insert the heroine back into her own novel and change the ending to a more satisfying one to most of the readers. As a Jane Bond-type heroine of the Literary Spook business, Thursday continues her work in this novel which adds several novel ideas, a whole spate of them rather, to the idea of what constitutes a novel or any sort of writing for that matter. Below is a brief sample of what awaits you in my review or, if you ignore all warnings, the entire novel. The ladies on the Skyrail are helping each other work crossword puzzles and the answers to the clues come up, Meddlesome, Thursday, Goodbye. That plus the fact the seven women are all named Irma Cohen gives Thursday a pause. Plus her picnic gets rudely interrupted by a vintage Hispano-Suiza falling out of the sky on her blanket a few seconds after she runs from the area! When Thursday tries to explain to Victor at the LiteraTec office that she punched a neanderthal because she thought he had a gun on him, Victor objects that it would be ridiculous for a neanderthal to have gun. Thursday tries to explain that coincidences are mounting and that is also a waste of time. The world is going to end and nobody will listen to Thursday. The world actually ended at the beginning of Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" because the space was needed for a new freeway and Earth was in the way. But in this novel the entire Earth is being turned into a pink Jello Pudding or some British equivalent called Dream pudding. Thursday duly reports her conclusions about the world ending on some day in December, but Victor will have nothing of it.[page 69] He dumped my arrest report in his out tray and sat down. "Thursday," he said quietly, staring at me soberly. "I've been in law enforcement for most of my life and I will tell you right now there is no such offense as `attempted murder by coincidence in an alternative future by person or persons unknown.' " I sighed and rubbed my face with my hands. He was right, of course. Thursday does not lead a dull life. For example, note this report of her day to husband Landen. Cardenio is a previously unknown play by Shakespeare.[page 76] "Did you have a good day?" he asked at last. "Well," I began, "we found Cardenio, I was shot dead by an SO-14 marksman, became a vanishing hitchhiker, saw Yorrick Kaine, suffered a few too many coincidences and knocked a neanderthal unconscious." After the Eyre thing, women everywhere started to dress like Thursday who thought the whole chinos and a shirt fad was ridiculous. She asked the wife of a colleague dressed that way:[page 79] "If Bonzo the Wonder Hound had rescued Jane Eyre, would you all be wearing studded collars and smelling each other's bottoms?" Thursday's brother Joff was a minister in the Church of the Global Standard Deity and reported to her with some chagrin that the church had split in two for the third time in one week.[page 81] "No!" I said with as much surprise and concern in my voice as I could muster. "I'm afraid so. The new Global Standard Clockwise Deity have broken away due to unresolvable differences over the direction in which the collection plate is passed around." Try reading this novel from the last page back to the front or reading each page forward but upside down. It won't make any difference. Anyway you read this book, it is colorful, imaginative, literary, funny, mind-stretching, and mind-bending. Combine JK Rowling with Douglas Adams and mix in a little Doug Hofstadter, and you've got Jason Fforde. You have a Dickens of a time in store for you. This is a Ffunny Booke! Tie up your pet dodo so you won't be disturbed in the middle of a good laugh and read on . . . The remainder of my review can be found via DIGESTWORLD ISSUE#06b. Bobby Matherne.

I really want to award five stars, I really do, but this book is so off the wall, with a plot that confuses, meanders and I think, only makes sense if you've read the first in the series, it's 'confabulates me' regularly throughout. Don't get me wrong, it's good enough, just confusing in places and the character names are absurd in parts, cleverly brilliant in others, BUT, if you read books regularly, the names that do often pop up in the plot, will be familiar to almost everyone and the setting, an alternate universe 1980's, is equally clever in places and slightly confusing in others. An enjoyable read, but in parts, so off the wall it's like madness on paper, but in a good way. I'd really like to give five stars but four, under the circumstances, is applicable because of it's confounding, sometimes frustrating, occasionally quite clever nature.

It helps to know your classic literature when reading this book - not necessarily to have read it all but to know the basics. This book is also enhanced if you have read "Great Expectations" although it has to be said that you will not recognise Fforde's Miss Havisham in Dickens' original (although I think the version here is definitely an improvement !). There is a wealth of puns and wordplay ion this book as well as the literary references - for those of us who like this sort of thing it is a delight.What the author does, however, within the absurdity of being able to enter the plot of books and the alternative reality in which he sets the story, is to introduce some really powerful writing, mostly based around the character of Thursday Next. Her grief at the "death" of her husband (the beautifully named Landon Park-Laine) is real and touching and her determination to have him returned to the storyline is the driving force of the book. It is the character of Thursday and her real and recognisable emotions and behaviour that grounds the book and stops it becoming silly although the delight for the reader is the increasing amounts of amusement to be gained from the absurdities.I recommend these books for all those who enjoy words. I think that they woudl be very much enjoyed by fans of Terry Prachett.

Oddly, this book isn’t listed under comedy or humour on Amazon. I think, however, it’s supposed to be funny, perhaps witty? I confess I found it more irritating than amusing.Written in a style that makes the author appear self-congratulatory and strangely complacent as he waves the flag declaring ‘aren’t I clever?’, the book plays with language, names, and other literature in the way a sixth-form lad might indulge. I found the names too obvious to be funny and the puns sometimes excruciating.This writer is a popular author with a big following, so my honest review will do him no damage, I hope. But this book wasn’t for me and I won’t bother with any more of his output.I found it tedious, juvenile, and simply too ‘clever’ for its own good.

Lost in a Good Book picks up the story of literary detective and heroine Thursday Next, from where The Eyre Affair (read my review here) left off. Now married to Landen Parke-Laine and enjoying the fame associated with her spectacular defeat of the villain Acheron Hades, it seems that Thursday is set for a life of relative stability and happiness. But shortly after discovering that she is pregnant, she learns that her husband has been 'eradicated' by the nefarious Goliath Corporation. In an effort to retrieve one of their operatives, Jack Schitt, from his incarceration in Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, Goliath have removed Landen Parke-Laine from existence, with only Thursday's memories of him intact. By using this as leverage, Goliath force Thursday to find a way of retrieving Schitt from the infamous poem. Recalling her mysterious trip into Jane Eyre as a small girl, Thursday realises an ability to read herself into books and becomes apprenticed to Miss Havisham of Great Expectations - a member of the book security network, Jurisfiction. And so the chase begins, with Thursday determined to find a route into The Raven in order to secure Schitt and guarantee the return of her husband.I am a big fan of Jasper Fforde's work. His books are enormous fun and intelligently constructed, with great appeal to those who enjoy literary allusion and satire. Lost in a Good Book offers unique perspective on well-known works - with Thursday's secondment to Great Expectations, a brief sojourn into Kafka's The Trial, and a Jursifiction Committee Meeting that takes place in Sense and Sensibility. These are not, however, allusions designed for intellectual consideration. Rather, Fforde's purpose is to bring pure and unadulterated enjoyment to his readers.Lost in a Good Book employs many of the mechanisms that made The Eyre Affair a literary success, but most of its appeal undoubtedly resides in its protagonist. Thursday Next is the epitome of an independent and uncompromising heroine - defiant, brilliant, and perceived as the greatest threat to the villains of the piece. I believe that it is shockingly rare to find a female heroine presented as such purely on the basis of her personal virtues and vices. Fforde's faithful and consistent delivery of a character worthy of admiration is a large part of the series' brilliance. Combined with a humour that virtually leaps off of the pages, no aspect of this book speaks to anything other than an utter zest for literary entertainment.So with some fantastically farcical literary crossovers (I mean, who could not love the idea of Miss Havisham saving Heathcliff from assassination?) and the greatest of comical heroines, Lost in a Good Book serves as perfect light escapism for the dedicated bibliophile. This book is the perfect means for reading relaxation!

An absolute must for Fforde fans and thoroughly required reading for Next-lovers. Delightful, amusing, heartfelt in places and impossible to second guess, just how we like our Thurs.I'll be tearing right on into the next installment!For a world that seems so regularly insane enjoy some pleasing insanity in your reading.