The Well of Lost Plots (Thursday Next Series)
by Jasper Fforde
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jasper FfordeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-08-03
ISBN: 0143034359
Number of pages: 375
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of The Well of Lost Plots (Thursday Next Series)
Book Review: The Write Stuff
Summary: 5 Stars
As previously encountered in Jasper Fforde's first two installments in the Next series (THE EYRE AFFAIR and LOST IN A GOOD BOOK), the real world "now" is England of 1985, where dodo birds are kept as pets, a special police unit drives stakes through vampires' hearts, Tunbridge Wells has been ceded to Russia in war reparations, London to Sydney travel time is 40 minutes by Gravitube through the Earth's center, air travel is by lighter-than-air airship, cheese is contraband, there's a duty on custard, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis has been recreated from recovered DNA and now provides society with its minimum-wage untermenschen, time travel is a reality, and 249 wooly mammoths in nine herds migrate back and forth across Britain. The heroine of the series is Thursday Next, a Literary Detective in department 27 of SpecOps, the national law enforcement megaforce. The mission of SO-27, among other things, is to validate the authenticity of recently discovered works by dead authors. By the end of LOST IN A GOOD BOOK, Next, pursued by the evil mega-corporation Goliath, temporarily flees into BookWorld, a sort of parallel universe where the volumes that humans read in the "now" are created. There, she volunteers for Jurisfiction, a policing agency that labors literally inside fictional works to keep plots, grammar and characters from spinning out of control. If you loved Alice's Wonderland, you'll be entranced by BookWorld.
THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS evolves almost entirely within BookWorld and within books themselves, which can be entered by Jurisfiction agents pretty much as the characters in the film MARY POPPINS popped in and out of chalk pavement pictures. Bookworld is an enthralling achievement of the author's imagination, but is too complex a place to describe fully in any brief synopsis. A few descriptive snapshots must suffice:
1. Literary characters become flesh and blood in BookWorld, e.g., Miss Havisham of GREAT EXPECTATIONS, who acts as Thursday's mentor and, at one point, is assigned the duty of chairing the ongoing rage-counseling sessions for the characters of WUTHERING HEIGHTS.
2. The HQ of Jurisfiction is the unused ballroom of Norland Park, the Dashwood house in SENSE AND SENSIBILITY.
3. The characters (Humpty Dumpty, Little Bo-peep, the Butcher, Baker & Candlestick Maker, the Three Blind Mice, etc.) of Oral Traditions, i.e. nursery rhymes, have unionized and are threatening a 48-hour strike.
4. A book is constructed by artisans - wordsmiths, holesmiths, echolocators - and many of its component parts - plot devices, chapter endings, back(ground)stories, descriptive devices for marking time's passage - are available from vendors. Conversely, other life forms- grammasites, bookworms, mispeling vyruses, punctusauroids, scene stealers, PageRunners, inside traders - disrupt plot and grammar cohesion and are the quarry of Jurisfiction.
5. The twenty-six above-ground floors of the Great Library contain all books ever published; the twenty-six below-ground levels of THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS store all still in progress or the ones completed but never published.
6. A Storycode Engine is the imaginotransference machine that transmits books in the Great Library to its readers in Outland.
This novel incorporates both a murder mystery and its underlying grand conspiracy, but you, the reader, will be so absorbed in the marvelously imaginative construct of BookWorld that you may not notice until the story's final third. And by the conclusion, you'll agree with the Great Panjandrum who observes that Thursday Next "has The Write Stuff".
Fforde, via story elements and his characters' dialogue, doesn't pass up the opportunity to take a few mild swipes at the current state of literary fiction, which is bedeviled by recycled plots and the rarity of One Original Idea. Perhaps, with the Next series, Jasper shows us what's possible.
Summary of The Well of Lost Plots (Thursday Next Series)
Jasper Fforde has done it again in this genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment. After two rollicking New York Times bestselling adventures through Western literature, resourceful literary detective Thursday Next definitely needs some downtime. And what better place for a respite than in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots, where all unpublished books reside? But peace and quiet remain elusive for Thursday, who soon discovers that the Well is a veritable linguistic free-for-all, where grammasites run rampant, plot devices are hawked on the black market, and lousy books?like the one she has taken up residence in?are scrapped for salvage. To make matters worse, a murderer is stalking the personnel of Jurisfiction and it?s up to Thursday to save the day. A brilliant feat of literary showmanship filled with wit, fantasy, and effervescent originality, this Ffordian tour de force is the most exciting Thursday Next adventure yet.
Read Jasper Fforde's posts in the Penguin Blog
Read Jasper Fforde's posts in the Penguin Blog
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