Struggling to Remember:
War, Trauma, and the
Adventures of Thursday Next
Those not already familiar with the witty, genre-bending works of
novelist Jasper Fforde soon will be. A refugee from the film industry, in which
his career varied over thirteen years, Fforde had been writing purely for his own
amusement until 2001, when Hodder & Stoughton took a chance on his oftrejected novel, The Eyre Affair. The publication, according to Hodder Publicity
(2002), started a “book phenomenon” gamering dozens of vociferous reviews.
The Eyre Affair entered the New York Times Bestseller List during its first week
of U. S. publication. Fforde’s second novel. Lost in a Good Book, followed a
scant year later, setting the tone for his prolific and astonishingly inventive
series. The Well o f Lost Plots and Something Rotten followed in subsequent
summers. Fforde’s unique and exciting contributions to popular fiction have
garnered a large, quasi fanatic fan base.
The heroine of Fforde’s series is the literary detective Thursday Next.
To encapsulate Thursday’s world, which is set in a parallel universe circa 1985
in Swindon, England: books are coveted as precious commodities and criminals
steal manuscripts, which are more lucrative on the black market; Byronic verse
is forged and pawned off on uneducated collectors; villains plot to kill “dull”
literary characters, thereby permanently changing the original manuscript and all
copies ever printed from it; and thousands of citizens bear the names of famous
characters, creating the need for identification numbers, such as John Milton
436. In this universe, book characters take the stage to repeat their lines in turn,
and leave to pursue their own interests when the narrative turns from them.
Appealing to literati who live in their books, as Thursday in fact does in the
second installment, Fforde weaves an intricate universe with witty dialogue,
frequent puns intelligible only to the over-read and high action thrills that draw
the reader into her life and death struggles with her archenemy Acheron Hades
and his family, in later installments.
Above all, Fforde’s writing is more than just an entertaining blend of
science fiction and detective/action fiction; it is full of contemporary concerns
and realities that society is not always willing or eager to acknowledge and plays
upon the mutability of time and memory by creating a world in which time and
events can be revised. Like great authors throughout history, he draws on the
great works that have come before, adding, like Eliot, his own interpretation and