Something Rotten in bookstores near you

Jasper Fforde, British-born author and professional ditherer (as he describes himself) charmed a packed female audience with a steady flow of witty self-deprecating humour at the McGill bookstore Friday Oct. 22. Fforde not only made his readers laugh, they giggled “school-girl” style as he read excerpts from his coming Thursday Next detective series book called Something Rotten.

The first book in the series, entitled The Eyre Affair, draws readers into the world of Thursday Next, when she finds herself inadvertently spiraled “Alice-in-Wonderland” style into the book Jane Eyre. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that ‘fiction-travel’ is only one of the many extraordinary occurrences in these books. All standard rules and literary devices are thrown out the window (only to come back and hit you on the head!) in this ‘fiction-jumping’ roller-coaster ride that continues into the second and third installments. They’re called appropriately, Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots.

Readers are carried off into the strangest land of coincidences and improbabilities through Thursday’s hilarious reality-hopping, twisted adventures that could best be described as a Hitchhiker’s guide to 1984 as seen through the lens of Harry Potter as a adult Monty Python script writer. In short, brilliant. (I’m using one of his literary devices to prove my point).

For a writer who refers to himself as the “underachieving child in a family of Oxford and Cambridge academics,” where he was the only person at the dinner table without the term “Doctor” announcing him, he certainly seems to have overcome whatever complex he might have developed from this -only to find himself on the other side of the looking glass, completely free of conventional boundaries. Perhaps his family was disappointed that they let Jasper “run amuck” in his youth, but the world is the better for it. Ironically, many of the writers to whom Jasper makes reference in his books are famous writers who themselves blasted through the norm of their respective literary and historical eras, only to be hailed as the greatest and most creative writers of the ages: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Charlotte Bronte, and Kafka, to name a few. Like many of these authors, Fforde allows himself to indulge in critiques of many socially repugnant practices while masking these critiques with humour.

The monopolies of big industry, government B.S., the media, cheesy talk shows, people’s obsession with celebrity, fads, and the people who are slaves to fads-all take knocks. Readers can have a laugh at the real world from the relative safety of Fforde’s fictional world.

His lead character, Thursday Next, is probably the most realistically three-dimensional female protagonist I’ve come across in male authors’s fiction in a while. When I asked Mr. Fforde how he came to create Thursday, he said that he “never really thought about it”. He had been working on secondary female characters in his Humpty Dumpty book, appropriately called The Big Over Easy, and that he just found them more interesting to write.

When he tried to get into the head of a first-person female character, he said with Thursday, it was slightly more difficult perhaps then he had anticipated, but that he never assumed he couldn’t do it. Though he did not attribute his insight into women to his family situation, his earlier reference to his wife and teen-aged daughters tipped off the admiring all-female crowd that he was indeed very familiar with the real-life concerns of women of all ages! Perhaps it is Thursday Next’s believability that grounds the reader enough to be swept away in the crazy whirlwind of impossibility of plot and setting of all four books.

Not only a smart and savvy author, Fforde is a good public relations guy and he knows (unlike some authors) how to put a good thing on hold. That is why he is using his newest deal to write three more books outside of the Thursday Next series. His newest book about Humpty Dumpty and the mystery of his fall, if Fforde’s pitch is any indication, promises to be just as delightful as Thursday’s adventures. Based on his original story idea, the one that propelled Fforde into writing in the first place, these fairy tale characters promise to take on new life in his hands.

Something Rotten is available in paperback now in bookstores, and The Big Over Easy is due out next summer. For more details (and to get a taste of Fforde’s playful humour) check out www.thursdaynext.com where you can fill out mock surveys about whether Hamlet should “off himself” or read an advertisement about a product found only in one of Fforde’s books. However, I recommend to read the books first.

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