Your Humble Blogger has been enjoying Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, and finally read the third, The Well of Lost Plots. It’s good.
For those Gentle Readers who don’t know about ’em, Thursday Next begins as a perfectly ordinary SpecOps officer, dealing with literature-related crimes in a world where the Crimean War never ended, books are closer to the cultural core than television, and people are named things like Thursday Next. Eventually, she winds up in the BookWorld, interacting with fictional characters both in their own books and in their free time, and takes up another law enforcement role in Jurisfiction. This book takes a lot of time mucking around in the actual mechanism by which stories are transferred to the reader via the author and the BOOK technology, due for a big upgrade. As a result, Ms. Next spends a lot of time in the titular Well, in a book that hasn’t been written and probably won’t be.
Don’t start with the third one, not only because there is a sort of story arc over the books, but because it’s not as good as the first two. There is a lot of funny stuff, but the first book has all the fun of showing us the world before heading into Jane Eyre, and the second has the fun of introducing us to Jurisfiction. The third introduces us to the mechanics of it, which aren’t actually much fun, and doesn’t make up for it in much of any way.
Well, except that, you see, they’re gearing up for the big upgrade, and there are a lot of loose ends to clear up, including the whole “that that” and “had had” business. Since those usages are confusing and distracting, in theory a book has to apply to the Genre Council for approval to use them, although over time not only had their standard for approval been inconsistent, effort put into enforcement had been inconsistent. Now, with the upgrade coming, they have to find out whether a particular “that that” that appears in the book is OK or not, and say things like “David Copperfield, unlike Pilgrim's Progress, which had had had, had had had had. Had had had had TGC's approval?” Not often anybody gets to use that one in context, even if they have to build a whole damned book of context around it.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
Yeah, I thought the third book was rather a step down from the first two. Things did pick up a bit after he got through the outrageous amount of set-up at the beginning of the book, which seemed like nothing but a thin, thin skeleton on which to hang Xanth-level puns, and I liked the characters of the two generics, but it was still weak. Also, the plot seemed like too much of a diversion from Thursday’s story arc. I’m willing to call this one a misstep and still check out the next one, but if that book continues the downhill slide, I’m jumping ship.
Xanth-level puns
Ooh, that’s harsh. Harsh, but fair.
Thanks,
-V.
I’m trying to remember, though. Isn’t WoLP the Next book with the Wuthering Heights therapy session? I remember it as being a step down from the previous two, as you said, but well worth it just for a few of those exchanges.
Francis, I have bad news for you about Book Four. Maybe not a step down, but certainly not a step up. We do get to find out a great deal about Granny Next, though.