The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde

"How was your day today?" asked Gran as I walked back on board the Sunderland.
"Very... expositional to begin with," I said, (...) "but it ended quite dramatically."

Jasper Fforde really knows how to tell a good story. His characters are vivid and engaging... his ideas are imaginative. He has obviously spent a great deal of time thinking through all the workings of his fictional universe. I just wish he'd spend a bit *less* time sharing every detail with his readers and more time on the plot.

As this story opens, Thursday Next, literary detective, has decided to go into hiding in a never-published, substandard crime novel. She is hired by Jurisfiction, the literary world's internal policing system, as a new apprentice. There's plenty going on in the Book World - a minotaur is on the loose, the three witches from Macbeth keep making mad prophecies about Thursday's life that somehow, unnervingly, come true, and someone is systematically killing off Jurisfiction agents. But wait! What about the cliffhanger ending of the last book, Lost in a Good Book?? I was waiting to find out how Thursday was going to bring her eradicated husband back to existence and squirm her way out of the rather serious situation she'd got herself into (ie, hunted by the evil Goliath megacorporation AND by SpecOps, her old "real world" employer). Apparently, Mr Fforde has decided that story needs to be put on hold for about oh, the length of a book, treated as just another side plot while he shares with us all these fascinating details about the Book World (see above). And besides, this means he doesn't have to come up with a new cliffhanger ending for this book - he can just recycle the idea from the last novel, which, not surprisingly, is perfectly justified by the rules of the fictional universe he himself created - a place where there hasn't been an original idea for over a hundred years.

This series is quite maddening, because the stories and characters make for compelling reading, but the books rarely manage to make me laugh out loud and tend to be a little heavy on the details. I think I will probably read the next one, and the next, and the next, just to find out what happens, but will likely gripe about each one along the way. Lucky readers of this blog can look forward to my review of the next title, Something Rotten, which appears (judging from the Amazon.com reviews) to pick up where the aforementioned cliffhanger ending left off.

Other books I've read by this author:
Lost in a Good Book

The Friend who Got Away edited by Jenny Offill & Elissa Schappell

I saw this book in Village Books a few weeks back and decided to request it from the library. Today I picked it up, read about half and realized I just wasn't going to be able to finish it. It's a collection of 20 essays by woman writers, sharing stories about the loss of friendship, usually a long-term friendship with another woman that started in childhood. Far too many of these tales are excruciatingly self-absorbed as the writers share every nuance of their efforts to figure out what went wrong or attempt to explain why they took the actions that brought an end to the friendship. Others simply lay out the events that led to the friendship's demise, without all the elaborate explanation and "intellectual" writing style that mars the other stories - can you tell these were the stories I preferred? (I wish there had been more of them!) Most surprising to me was the pair of stories by two women who had once been close, each writing her own emotional version of the "breakup". I wanted to knock their heads together and tell them to get off their narcissistic high horses and either make amends, or move on. There's something decidedly weird to me about choosing to write together about a friendship and its end in such a public way. I don't get it.

I just can't say that I find this book as gripping and extraordinary as the book jacket promises (not that I'm saying I believe everything I read in a book jacket!). The stories told here are quite painfully ordinary, and I'm left hoping that their publication helped the writers to come to terms with the lost relationships they write about, because frankly, they aren't offering me much enlightenment about my own experiences of lost friendship.

Morality for Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith

Mma Ramotswe and her assistant Mma Makutsi are moving up in the world. They are hired by two very important men to solve cases, and become responsible for the Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors business when Mma Ramotswe's fiance, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, is overcome by depression.

Thanks to the Burnaby Public Library, the third installment in the "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series made its way to me yesterday. These books are such a delightful treat - nice quick reads, engaging characters who are becoming very familiar but not at all dull.

For some reason (perhaps as a way of prolonging the engagement?), Mr McCall Smith appeared to want to get Mr J. L. B. Matekoni out of the way for this book. So he made him depressed and exiled him to the "Orphan Farm" for most of the book. I'm not disappointed that we got to spend more time with Mma Makutsi, whose role has moved far beyond that of secretary. She's every bit as fun as her boss, and just as prone to moments of philosophical reflection.

Speaking of which, I thought I'd share one of Mma Ramotswe's internal monologues from p. 78. She is really big on morality and values, and has very decided opinions about the way people ought to think and live.

"Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another -- not even for his wife -- would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls -- young existentialist girls -- you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.

Mma Ramotswe did not treat her maid, Rose, in an existentialist way..."

Other books I've read by this author:
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Portuguese Irregular Verbs

Fforde's ffolly

I finished another Alexander McCall Smith book today and have my nose stuck in "The Well of Lost Plots". However, I can't wait until I finish that to tell you that I just discovered that Jasper Fforde has one of the most extensive and entertaining author websites I've ever seen - it's not easy to navigate, but it has just as much personality coming through as the official site of another favourite writer of mine, Lindsey Davis.

Enjoy!

www.jasperfforde.com
www.lindseydavis.co.uk

PS I particularly recommend the ffotographica section of Jasper Fforde's website - he has taken some truly wonderful photos.

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

Literary detective Thursday Next is on a mission to save the world, but first she needs to figure out how to retrieve her husband, who has been erased from existence, and dodge the mysterious villain who is using entropic powers to try and bring Thursday's life to an early end.

It's been some time since I read Fforde's debut novel, "The Eyre Affair", and I'm glad that I finally remembered to pick up this sequel on a recent trip to the library. Fforde's style has been described as "decidedly quirky and strangely thought-provoking" and I'd say that is definitely an accurate assessment of "Lost in a Good Book". Protagonist Thursday Next lives in a sort of "alternate 1980s" where extinct species have been revived, the world is in the clutches of a megacorporation called Goliath, people can travel through time and, most importantly, people and characters can travel in and out of books. A whole bureaucratic system has been set up to detect literary infractions and forgeries, as stories in this world are fluid and changeable.

Like another "humorous" book I read recently, this book did not make me laugh out loud - I'd say that it is merely "clever and amusing", rather than truly funny - but there's a solid story behind the quirky premises in this book, and Thursday Next feels like a real, compelling heroine so it's easy to overlook the silly names and not-quite-funny attempts at social satire.

The next title in this series is waiting on my bookshelf!