Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde

Warning: This will probably be the most biased review that I will ever write. In fact, I don't think I should call it a review, maybe I should just categorize this under "gushing." In any case, please direct hate mail to the comments section because if you're going to be rabid or even just disagree, I'd rather it be organized. Thank you.

I have to say, flat out, that I adore the Thursday Next books. All four of them. When a friend first told me about them, I was iffy because as I've said, I'm pretty stubborn when it comes to reading material. I'm so glad I gave it a try, though. Given the fact that I am not that difficult to please, I had the greatest time reading this series. I am not saying that Thursday Next is the greatest heroine of all time, nor am I saying that these are the greatest written novels of all time.

However.

Thursday Next is an average-looking, thirty-ish British woman who formerly served in the Crimean War. Afterwards, she got a job working for Spec-Ops 27, a police division neither famous nor well funded and dedicated to art and literature. She is what is called a literary detective. Examples of her duties are as follows: tracking down rare/stolen manuscripts (i.e. the original manuscript of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit), detecting fraudulent Shakespeare plays (through a machine called the Verse Meter Analyzer), and firing the occasional gunshot.

(Okay. How can you resist that?! Is that not the best job ever? Even if the New York Times called the books a “Harry Potter for adults,” I doubt JK Rowling could create a job this amazing for characters, both present and future.)

In The Eyre Affair, Thursday’s uncle Mycroft comes up with the Prose Portal (after which this community is proudly named), enabling access to any form of text. It is first tested on his wife Polly, who enters Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud and finds herself by lake, complete with dappled shades, the soft breeze, daffodils, and Wordsworth himself who has only the faintest idea of the outside world. When the Prose Portal is stolen, minor characters start disappearing from books. In Thursday’s world, once a character disappears, it is as if they have never existed. The plot changes to accommodate their loss and observant readers are at once keen and immediately report to the literary detectives. In some instances, the characters are so minor and the plot is not affected much so readers have to accept and move on. In The Eyre Affair, however, Jane Eyre disappears. Now, when one of the most-read novels loses its heroine, chaos naturally ensues. Thursday, aside from it being her job, is personally affected and not only because Jane Eyre is her favorite. It is in this first and amazing rescue that Fforde introduces the wonder that is Thursday Next.

The subsequent books, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten, respectively, proceed to draw the reader further into the crazy details of Thursday’s world. There is action and there are John Milton conventions. There is science-fiction and there are cloned Neanderthals trained only for manual labor. There is mystery and there is a multi-colored convertible. There is romance and there are picketing characters from nursery rhymes. Above all, there is humor and there are vampires.

Of course, Thursday Next wouldn’t be Thursday Next without an equally quirky set of family members. Her mother is Wednesday Next, who is not quite successful at running the household. Thursday’s father, Colonel Next, is running from the government and his chosen hideout is deep within time’s recesses, only dropping in for time-stopping conversations once in a while. There is Joffy Next (why he got stuck with the normal name, I don’t even know) who has set up his own successful religion called the Global Standard Deity. There is Granny Next who can only die after reading the ten most boring classics (she doesn’t know which ones so she has to read everything. Some even twice.) There is her husband Landen Parke-Laine who is there one minute and gone the next. Their son is Friday Next and they have a pet dodo called Pickwick. Alongside the Next family are more kooks that would take too much time to describe (Cop out!!).

Don’t worry, I’m almost done.

The best parts of the Thursday Next books for me are all the wonderful cameo roles! It’s a very interactive series, mainly because you won’t be able to stop from grinning and arrogantly saying “Aha!” every time you recognize a character and/or their, um, characteristics. For instance, when Hamlet makes an appearance, you can bet that he’s indecisive. Miss Havisham, assigned to be Thursday’s tutor in Lost in a Good Book, is stern and drives race cars. The Cheshire Cat is The Librarian, having memorized all the information on every book that exists, whether it is published or not. Heathcliff is a matinee idol and always wins “Troubled Romantic Lead (Male)” at the Bookworld Awards (the equivalent of the Academy Awards for the world of fiction, with awards such as “Best Opening Line in a Novel, “Most Incomprehensible Plot,” etc.) There is a random appearance by Lucy Deane of The Mill on the Floss and we are taken into the Haworth House of Sense and Sensibility, which they have deemed their Jurisfiction heaquarters.

I could go on and on about these books but I shouldn’t because you really should just read them on your own! Of course, some books are a little more dragging than the others but taken as a whole, I love them. I love them. I love them.

On a sidenote, Jasper Fforde’s latest is called The Big Over Easy which is about Humpty Dumpty and other characters from nursery rhymes. I haven’t tried it because I’m afraid of breaking the Fforde spell.

(For those of you who are interested, they are selling the Thursday Next boxed-set at Powerbooks for Php 1,540.00 thereabouts)

Related links:

Jasper Fforde
Thursday Next

The Biographer’s Tale by A.S. Byatt

Naive critics are accustomed to saying that life is random, things do not turn out, or present themselves, in life with the glittering appositeness and fated inevitability that they do in literature. Everyday experience contradicts this silly wisdom every day – The Biographer's Tale

My first encounter with A.S. Byatt was through a borrowed copy of Possession for which I am, to this day, grateful. It was not only because I was able to, god forbid, relate, being a Literature graduate and not unfamiliar with the tedious but fulfilling process of reading, analysis and research. It was because Possession had a great set of characters, an even better story, and a pleasing density of language that had me running for my own copy.

Enter The Biographer’s Tale.

 

Phineas G. Nanson is a postmodern literary theory graduate student, working on a dissertation called “Personae of female desire in the novels of Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster and Somerset Maugham.” In the middle of a lecture on Lacan, he realizes that he cannot go on with what he is doing. He embarks himself on a mission to work with “concrete” things (to say “real” is debatable, especially in his acquired post-structuralist mindset) and his first step was to abandon his dissertation for the more “other-centric” discipline of the biography. Initially thinking the biography a “gossipy” form, Nanson promptly changes his mind after reading the work of biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes and, in fact, decides to write a biography of the biographer.

And so it begins. Like Possession, we are given a firsthand look into the process of research and in Nanson’s case, to start out with almost nothing. Given the fact that Scholes Destry-Scholes is no popular figure, Nanson has an exceptionally hard time piecing scraps of documents together to form a somewhat coherent whole. We are shown parts of an Ibsen biography, as well as those of Francis Galton and Carl Linnaeus. In this process, as almost all stories go, he is able to look into himself as well as Scholes Destry-Scholes by the end of it. In addition, fans of history and literary theory will have a ball with the smattering of the terminology and the names close to their hearts.

I’m going to be honest (hey we’re all honest folk here at Prose Portal) and admit that although I enjoyed it on the whole, reading this book was pretty slow-going. It is not, shall we say, as fluid an experience as it is reading Possession. I believe that one reason is that ¾ of the novel is comprised of the actual fragmented research material that Nanson is assembling. Of course, while these parts are essential and interesting at the most, they also resulted in “rushing” the story itself. Perhaps that is what Byatt aimed to do – to muffle both biographers and pay tribute only to the complexities of biography – and by that route she succeeds.