First among sequels

Spec Ops have been disbanded. Thursday Next leaves her husband and three children every day to go and work at Acme Carpets. But what she’s not telling her family, is that the carpet business is just a front, oh and that she may just occasionally be jumping into BookWorld to continue her job with Jurisfiction.

Hilarious and incredibly topical in places. I sincerely wish the Common Sense Party were actually real. Although I’m definitely glad we don’t have to smuggle cheese from Wales. Of course, the literary playfulness within BookWorld is just a joy to read. You can open it up at practically any page and find something to laugh at. Thursday is also faced with her fictional selves, who she has to tutor. If you haven’t read this series, you must! I love how the classics are still being shaped by hiccups, just like the initial adventure in Jane Eyre.

Moving Thursday forward in time means that BookWorld is facing some tough challenges. How to compete with multimedia and shortened attention spans? Many a publisher’s thought these days. The Book Reality Show highlights a very real fear among book lovers; we don’t want gimmicks to get in the way of a good story. In a bid to innovate, it’s easy to forget about the novel and end up somewhere in games.

I do absolutely love Jasper Fforde, so I’m pretty happy to read without a discernable plot, which for a large part of the book, I couldn’t really work out. There are lots of threads and some of them seem to be forgotten about. It’s only when you get nearer the end that the connection becomes apparent.

I’m usually quite happy with my favourite series not being adapted for the screen, but I so want to see an actual army of Danverclones. Be prepared for a cliffhanger ending, but it’s OK, the next book is already out.

[a: Jasper Fforde|4432|Jasper Fforde|http://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1350497674p2/4432.jpg] reminds me of a [a: Douglas Adams|4|Douglas Adams|http://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1189120061p2/4.jpg] who came from a happier home. (I have no idea what Adams' home life was like, but for the sake of analogy, humour me.) His humour is less biting, but just as madcap, his characters are kinder, and easier to like, but the surreality is, I think, just as strong, and listen to this nice bit of language on pianos: "Composed of 550lbs of iron, wood, strings, and felt, the 88-key instrument is capable of the most subtle of melodies, yet stored up in the tensioned strings is the destructive force of a family saloon moving at 20 miles per hour."

If you read for plot, you're not going to like this book. In fact, if you read for narrative, you may not like it either: at one point, with the future of the time-stream in the balance, a chapter is taken off for an adventure in laying carpet. This interlude has no connection whatsoever to anything happening before or after; you either embrace this sort of thing, or go mad.

I can't remember if I've enthused about Thursday as a heroine, but really, she just keeps on getting better. She's an action heroine who doesn't carry a gun, (mostly), she's middle-aged, happily married with children, and not terribly good at communicating with her loved ones. She's female, but not highly gendered, and I think her hair colour may be mentioned once but I don't recall at the moment what it is.

This book is fairly standard for Fford, but he does two interesting things with the first-person narrator, neither of which I wish to spoil for you, so go read it yourself.