måndag 4 april 2011

The genius of Jasper Fforde

It's not often I buy a book in hardcover. I know hardcover books are more elegant and durable, but try lugging one to work and back for your lunch read every day and the elegance soon palls. A week or so ago, I made an exception, however, as I could not bear to wait any longer for Jasper Fforde's latest Thursday Next novel. Luckily, the hardcover was pretty trim and lugging it to work never became a problem, as I finished it in one weekend.

It's not surprising I should like Fforde's books, as I'm 1 bookish 2 a geek. The combination of an alternative reality world and references to classics such as Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontës and lots and lots of Dickens is pure bliss for me. But Fforde doesn't only have a marvellous premise which must appeal to millions of bookworms - the notion that yes, somewhere the world of books does exist in real life, as do your favourite fictional characters - he follows it through and comes up with new inventive ideas all the time. Take the scene where Thursday, Fforde's heroine, is up before the court of Kafka's "The Trial", or the one where she gets stranded in a lecture on Ethics and as captain of the boat Moral Dilemma has to face those gruesome constructed problems you (hopefully) only encounter in Philosophy Class.

It's the follow-through I admire in Fforde, not just the inventiveness. He not only comes up with a good scenario, but gives a great deal of thought to it. In the latest novel, "One of Our Thursdays is Missing", Thursday (not the real one, the written one - long story) has to visit the part of BookWorld called Conspiracy. It's the home of among others aliens, Elvises and "the notion that FDR somehow knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor". So far, so funny, but Fforde has taken the time to enter the mindset of the Conspiracy-dwellers: "They banish us here to Fiction [...] when we should be up there, in Non-Fiction." I like details like these, which add a kind of weird realism to the flights of fancy.

Another strong point with Fforde is the characterisation of the main characters (and some, if not all, of the minor ones). Thursday Next is a lovely, feisty heroine, though not without her faults - she tends to underestimate her enemies, for instance, and to forget that they may have feelings too. Not surprising, really, as Fforde's villains are mostly cartoonish, though fun. Jack Spratt, Mary Mary and their nerdy alien sidekick Ashley in the Nursery Crime series are also engaging characters. (The Nursery Crime series is good too, but as a foreigner I enjoy the Thursday Next novels more - I know my English classics, but nursery rhymes are a different matter.)

I didn't care for the leads in "Shades of Grey" though - a novel set in a dystopian future where everyone is severely colour-blind. The heroine Jane (of course) Grey is a humourless, violent revolutionary who I'm sure would join a terrorist group like Rote Armee Fraktion in a heartbeat (except they would have to rename it Graue Armee Fraktion). The hero is all right, but wet. Fforde has put his normal amount of thought into his imagined world, but ironically, it is a bit too black and white. "Shades of Grey" demonstrates one of Fforde's weaknesses - sometimes, he can become just a little bit preachy. Don't get me started on the Neanderthals in the Thursday Next series - like Noble Savages, only even more annoying.

You can pick holes aplenty in Fforde's novels if you want to - and, an occupational hazard this, geeks often do want to. Fforde is not one to let consistency get in the way of a good story, or joke. The most glaring example is the way he completely destroys the premise of his first book, "The Eyre Affair" (which hinges on the assumption that a fictional character, especially a first-person narrator, cannot be replaced). In "The Well of Lost Plots", Fforde suddenly introduces the concept of "generics", characters who are moulded to fill different roles in fiction, and who can replace characters who are lost or crack under the strain of the parts they have to play. I never liked the "generics" concept much - I want fictional characters to be their characters, not just to act them - though I understand why it may have been a narrative necessity. There's not much suspense in a world where no-one is allowed to die as that would automatically ruin a Classic work. But it is a problem that it is never explained why the abduction of Jane Eyre in "The Eyre Affair" was such a big deal, when there must have been generics ready to take her place.

Fforde can be a bit too clever-clever at times - you can get enough of the genre-related book jokes after a while. Also, he can be guilty of "Sutherlandisms" - that is, like the literary critic John Sutherland, he may think he knows a book so well he doesn't have to check his facts, and then he gets some detail wrong which sometimes can ruin the whole argument or joke. "David Copperfield" is up for a re-read, I think: Fforde's DC jokes tend to be a bit off. (It's not just that I thought his Uriah was a disappointment, honest.) But Sutherlandisms can happen to us all and are not that serious, providing you don't make a living as an Eng.Lit. academic.

Going from one thing to another, what is the deal with the Goliath Corporation? Is it a parody of the typical Evil Corporation you find in all kinds of yarns from adventure stories to earnest thrillers? Or is it actually meant to be hard-hitting corporate satire? It's hard not to read Goliath's efforts to turn itself into a religion as a satire on the horror that is "corporate values". Marketing inedible meat from endangered penguins, though - come on, that has to be Evil Corporation parody, surely? Maybe Goliath is a mixture of parody and satire - anyway, it's churlish to complain, as I'm rather attached to the Goliath goons.

To sum up: quibbles aside, Fforde is seriously good. Think you're bookish? Think you're geeky? Buy him.