Jasper Fforde: Lost In A Good Book

By MICHAEL LARSEN

If you think that Jasper Fforde seems an unlikely name, wait until you get lost inside Lost In A Good Book. The cast of villains includes Special Ops agents Phodder and Kannon and Dedmen and Walken.

The book's heroine, Thursday Next, wants to rescue her recently eradicated husband Landen Park-Laine from somewhere in the past, and she can do so only by releasing Jack Schitt from the pages of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven. Otherwise Mr Schitt-Hawse will ensure she comes to a sticky end. As Thursday says when meeting John Smith from Weeds & Seeds division: "Unusual name." With me?

This, the follow-up to the eccentric epic The Eyre Affair, is indeed a Pythonesque romp through time, through literature and through the vivid imagination of Fforde himself. Let me explain.

Thursday is a Special Ops agent whose job it is to verify literary discoveries when they surface. To do this her father devised a portal which allowed her to travel in time and change the endings of literary works. She altered the ending to Jane Eyre which gave it a surprising resurgence in popularity. At the same time she trapped Mr Schitt, and if she wants Landen back, she has to get Schitt out.

The Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat, who used to be the Cheshire Cat but "they changed the county boundaries", seconds Thursday to Miss Haversham from Great Expectations and the fun begins.

It begins about a third of the way through, so the initial parts of the book seem like an excuse for Fforde to have some fun at our expense. But there is actually a plot here, of sorts, a kind of X-Files with verve and humour crossed with Monty Python. Kind of. There are also mammoths, Neanderthals - who are humans without humour in a Bladerunner kind of way - and, of course, Thursday has a pet. A dodo. Right, then.

It is not a book full of literary in-jokes designed to make you feel uneducated. When Thursday stumbles across what appears to be a genuine manuscript of a lost Shakespearean work - Cardenio - Fforde fills us in on the play's history, and the likelihood of its existence. Most people know Great Expectations, sure, but even so Fforde places some of Dickens' characters into a scene that Thursday stumbles across that fills in the gaps and makes them charmingly real.

Fforde is playing with us, for sure, but he loves his work. Despite the farcical nature of the "plot" he writes crisply, cleverly and also lovingly when discussing works of literature. As he says of the Jurisfiction Library: "These weren't just collections of words arranged neatly on a page, to give the impression of reality - each of these volumes was reality."

His aim with Lost In A Good Book is to remove you from your reality and take you to a place that suspends belief, that tests your faith in your own imagination - and his - and then spits you out the other side saying, "Wasn't that a great ride?" And isn't that what good fiction should do?

* Michael Larsen is an Auckland freelance writer.