One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

January 17, 2011
With the real Thursday Next missing, the "written" Thursday Next leaves her book to undertake an assignment for the Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department, in Fforde's wild and wacky sixth BookWorld novel (after Thursday Next: First Among Sequels). As written Thursday Next finds herself playing roles intended for her real counterpart, BookWorld's elite try to deal with a border dispute between Racy Novel and Women's Fiction. It's not always possible to know where one is in BookWorld, which has been drastically remade, or in Fforde's book, which shares the madcap makeup of Alice in Wonderland, even borrowing Alice's dodo. Outrageous puns (e.g., a restaurant called Inn Uendo) and clever observations relating to the real book world (e.g., the inhabitants of "Vanity" island now prefer Self-Published or Collaborative) abound. Fforde's diabolical meshing of insight and humor makes a "mimefield" both frightening and funny, while the reader must traverse a volume that's a minefield of unexpected and amusing twists. 10-city author tour.

February 1, 2011

Any intersection between Fforde's novels and a recognizably real world are almost entirely coincidental, for he's most at home in constructing insouciant (and elaborate) literary fantasies.

Thursday Next, the protagonist of many of the author's previous novels, is back...or rather, she's not, for she's the missing girl of the title. And although she vanishes, the written Thursday Next does not. The plot involves the search for the "real" Thursday Next, when she disappears a week before peace talks preceding the possible outbreak of a genre war, so the written Thursday Next sets out to find her. (Yes, it's all a bit confusing, and Fforde has great fun ringing changes on this confusion.) Written Thursday Next is on the case, exploring the various byways of BookWorld and eventually going up the mighty Metaphoric River, with its echoes of Conrad. Of course, in Fforde's fictive world almost everything has some kind of literary echo: Cabbies take the written Thursday to Norland Park (from Sense and Sensibility); she meets Jay Gatsby's less famous brother, the Loser Gatsby (younger sibling to the Mediocre Gatsby); she learns that Heathcliff is riding the same train she is (and notes "a lot of screaming and fainting girls on the platform whenever we stopped"); has drinks at the Bar Humbug; and comes across signs like "Do Not Feed the Ambiguity." Fforde, of course, finds all of this highly diverting and even includes sly references to The Eyre Affair, an earlier Thursday Next novel. To appreciate Fforde, it's both helpful and essential for a reader to have a substantial literary background. While some of the gags are sly and work well (for example, the confusion about whether a character named Red Herring is actually a red herring), others are rather forced and seem to exist solely for the sake of a punch line ("I think we've driven into a mimefield").

Your appreciation of Fforde will depend solely on your tolerance for self-conscious, and occasionally slick, literary cleverness.

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November 15, 2010

Where's Thursday Next when you need her? A Genre war is raging in the BookWorld, but Thursday has retired to the Realworld. In desperation, the Council of Genres turns to the written Thursday for help. Got that? Fforde returns to his Thursday series after the dystopian (but still funny) Shades of Grey and should sustain that series' success. With a ten-city tour.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.