Mon 23 Mar 2009
Reviewed by Walter Albert – Three by JASPER FFORDE (Thursday Next).
Posted by Steve under Reviews1 Comment
JASPER FFORDE – The Well of Lost Plots. Viking, hardcover, February 2004. Penguin, trade paperback, July 2004.
—, Something Rotten. Viking, hardcover, August 2004. Penguin, trade paperback, July 2005.
—, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels. Viking, hardcover, July 2007. Penguin, trade paperback, July 2008.
In the third and fourth of the Thursday Next alternate world fantasy detective series, Thursday first escapes into an inner world, a maelstrom where classic texts are in a constant flux, threatened from without and within (Lost Plots), then in Something Rotten returns to her native English town of Swinton, accompanied by her two year old son Friday, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Pickwick, her pet dodo, in search of her eradicated husband, Lamden.
She also has to deal with the possible end of the world, a rather full plate for the resourceful Thursday.
First Among Sequels, number five, begins fourteen years after number four. Thursday, her husband and two children, are living what appears to be something of a normal life in Swindon. Her SpecOps Division closed down in 1992 and she’s now working for Acme Carpets, or so her husband is meant to think.
SpecOps has gone underground/undercover and Thursday is still traveling to the Book World, which is, as usual, in some turmoil and threatened with extinction if the nefarious plans of the Goliath Corporation are successful.
In addition, Thursday is threatened with her most challenging enemy yet, her fictional self. And then there’s a continuing problem with her sixteen-year-old son Friday who refuses to accept his “ordained” role as a member of the time-traveling ChronoGuard.
I found numbers three and four to be less fresh, and funny, than the first two entries, but First Among Sequels immediately captured my interest and convinced me that these are the most engaging comic novels currently being published.
March 25th, 2009 at 12:54 am
Good to see someone else appreciates fforde and Thursday Next. The Jack Spratt books are great fun as well. I suppose the whimsey could be off putting to some, but fforde etches it in acid and the result is a series that is both fun and smart. They manage the rare feat of literary game play without the fussiness or fustiness that sometimes mars the genre.