First asterisk to the left and straight on till morning! (Lost in a Good Book - Jasper Fforde)

Name: andrewl

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Product:	Lost in a Good Book - Jasper Fforde
Date:	18/10/07 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Brilliantly written lunacy

Disadvantages: Airships over an alternate Britain, gah

Lost in a Good Book charts the continuing adventures of Thursday Next, dodo-owning, book-jumping, literary detective and decorated war hero. The book opens a few months after the events of Jasper Fforde's debut The Eyre Affair, and sees our heroine getting increasingly fed up with being at the centre of a media circus.

Facing a court case from the mysterious Jurisfiction for altering the ending to Jane Eyre, and dealing with blackmail threats from the sinister Goliath Corporation - who are desperate to retrieve their operative from the pages of Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Raven', it only takes a few short pages for the reader to realise that they're dealing with a very unique style of fiction.

Told entirely in the first person from Next's point of view, the Thursday Next series is relentlessly hilarious for anyone who's read a lot of books. I doubt there's many people who will nail every joke or reference that crops up in Fforde's writing - Lost in a Good Book contains a lot of Great Expectations, Sense and Sensibility, Alice in Wonderland and The Trial. While most people have read a bit of Austen, Dickens and Carroll, they're not always the same people who you find reading Kafka...

Set in an alternate Britain (a Republic with George Formby as President), Thursday Next's world is one where you can take a 'gravtube' to Tokyo in 40 minutes but there's no jet engine. In common with every alternate Britain that's EVER been created, the skies hang heavy with airships. I can only hope this is some kind of ironic nod from the author, because it's a cliche that really hacks me off.

In addition to the airships and the omni-present Goliath corporation ("For all you'll ever need"), Next's world is characterised by a rabid interest in literature. The Shakespeare lobby is influential enough to decide the outcome of general elections. The obsession is strong enough that the shadowy Special Ops need a branch devoted to the literary detectives.

Although this set-up is quirky to begin with, the story quickly gets madder and madder, while at the same time becoming more and more clever. From the moment where Thursday Next enters Jurisfiction, out-Kafkaing the prosecutor at her trial and becoming Miss Havisham's apprentice, it's probably fair to say that you need to be approaching a degree level handle on English Literature to get the most out of the book.

This isn't to say there's not a lot on offer to people who haven't read Edgar Allen Poe's poetry, or who have never wondered where the Red Queen's kingdom actually is. In the real world, there's a persistent hint that Acheron Hades may have survived The Eyre Affair, and is manipulating entropy to produce catastrophic coincidences. This thread turns into a truly goofy and lurid science-fiction thriller that counterpoints the quasi-philosophical adventures inside fiction.

Luckily, for a series of books that revolve around fiction and poke fun at cliches and narrative conventions, the Thursday Next novels are incredibly well-written. Next herself is a great heroine - faintly tomboyish without falling into the 'man with breasts' trap of many female leads written by men. Her devoted husband Landen takes care of the romance angle (although there's a great twist on this to keep things later on in the book) and she couldn't give a stuff about shopping. So she's an engaging and sympathetic female lead who doesn't get in the way of the adventure.

The other thing that I love about these books is that, believe it or not in this jaded age, they actually carry a whiff of originality about them! While postmodernism has lead to all sorts of explorations of the nature of fiction - from Last Action Hero to the bits in Doctor Who where Tom Baker used to talk to the audience - it's never been quite this systematic, or quite this much FUN. Populating 'bookworld' with an insane bureaucracy is a masterstroke, and there's a tortuous internal logic as Fforde pushes his creation to breaking point (even washing machine instruction manuals have a secret life, apparently).

I can unreservedly recommend this book - and indeed the whole series - to anyone who loves books. And as you'll hardly be buying any novel if you DON'T love books, I can recommend it to everyone, safe in the knowledge that the people who wouldn't like it won't be buying it anyway.

My copy is the first edition, which has a disappointingly muted cover compared to the pulp brilliance pictured on this site. It cost £6.99 but I got mine, inevitably, for 79p from a charity shop. Jasper Fforde novels are also a regular fixture on Waterstone's 3 for 2 tables, so fill your boots.

Summary: Thursday Next's adventures continue and are still brilliant!