More on LiteraTecs, JurisFiction, and other booknerdy things

[bloodygranuaile]

Last weekend I went on a splurge I couldn't quite afford and bought, among other things, the fourth and fifth Thursday Next books. They are several kinds of awesome.

The fourth book, Something Rotten, has a lot to do with politics, and it's really depressing how much of it seems to come off as satire on current American politics, despite the explanations for it being completely absurd. The plot revolves around Yorrick Kaine, a fictional character escaped into the real world, and his peculiar powers of mind-control, which allow him to get the British Parliament to pass all sorts of crazy measures, like “instituting a tertiary health-care system where we only treat people who are already sick, instead of having universal preventive care.” Because when you are a British author like Jasper Fforde, not having the government provide universal preventive health care is THE WACKIEST AND MOST HORRIBLE THING YOU CAN THINK OF. I kind of wish the US's current barbaric political actions were the result of something so simple, and that we could fix it by sending some of our politicians to whatever dystopian novel they escaped from (The Handmaid's Tale, probably).

Depressing political allegory aside, Something Rotten is hysterical. Thursday has to take Hamlet out into the Outland (what the book people call the real world), where he watches several adaptations of Hamlet and frets a lot about readers thinking he's an indecisive twit. Yorrick Kaine is in the middle of whipping up some serious anti-Danish sentiment in England, which causes assorted hilarious things to happen about Hamlet being Danish, and Thursday gets put in charge of confiscating Danish literature (which she, like all the other LiteraTecs who take this sort of thing seriously, try to smuggle into the Socialist Republic of Wales instead of actually handing over for burning). Thursday's dad, the time-traveling rogue ChronoGuard agent, keeps dumping historical houseguests at Thursday's mom's house while he tries to stop Admiral Nelson from getting killed back in eighteen something. A thirteenth-century prophet reactualizes, and Thursday ends up in charge of Swindon's croquet team because one of said prophet's predictions is that if Swindon doesn't win the croquet championship, there will be a nuclear war, but if they DO win, the Goliath Corporation will be destroyed. Landen gets uneradicated (yaaaaaaay!), and continues to be really dorky and awesome. I don't even remember the other twelve plotlines, but Thursday kicks ass in all of them, usually holding a two-year-old baby. (His name is Friday.) I still do not know what happened to Landen's books when he was eradicated. Also, there are Shakespeare clones, which is important because a lot of weird crap is happening to Shakespeare's works in the Bookworld, because the Bookworld is so unnecessarily complicated that books can change after they're written, which is why there is Jurisfiction. Sometimes Jurisfiction doesn't fix things; for example, they apparently didn't ever fix the unexplained departure of comedy from the once-hilarious Thomas Hardy novels. (Being a big Thomas Hardy fan and sort of a nerd for depressing rural England novels in general, I laughed my ass off at this.)

First Among Sequels takes place fifteen years later. Thursday is in her fifties; she and Landen have three kids (or possibly only two), the oldest of whom is sixteen and being too lazy to join the Chronoguard (as is his destiny); several terrible books have been written about her previous adventures, but her celebrity status has been reduced to Z; and she is working at a carpet store as a cover for continuing to work for SpecOps, which is also a cover for still being a Jurisfiction agent. Also she smuggles cheese, sometimes. In this version of 2002 at large, there is such a sensible government that the nation is suffering a stupidity surplus; people's attention spans are becoming too short for them to read very much; and the Goliath Corporation is starting to become a nuisance again. I cannot even begin to describe the plots, but I will tell you that there are three Thursdays (the regular one, an evil one and a hippie one), several Fridays of various ages and from various timelines, and some special guest hauntings by Uncle Mycroft. One of the plots involves the Chronoguard and Friday's destiny and something about time travel not being invented yet; another is about classic works of literature going “interactive” and basically being turned into reality TV, but in the actual books, meaning the originals would change. (Making reality TV shows based on works of classic literature could actually be fucking hilarious and if I were in charge of a TV network I would totally do it. But that is not what was happening.) There is also a lot of crazy crap about Bookworld geography, which left me with lots of unanswered questions. Like, do the books physically move their place in the Nothing if they are reclassified? Where do books that are classified under multiple genres go? How do you get from one language's Bookworld to another's? I am very curious here!

I really cannot recommend this series highly enough, especially to people who are big literature nerds and who like absurdist pseudo-technology and textual innuendo.

The sixth book, One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing, has just come out in hardcover, but alas, I cannot afford hardcover right now. This is sad, because Jasper Fforde leaves a mega-shit-ton of loose ends untied up at the end of First Among Sequels, and I want to know what happens with the Minotaur and the serial killer (it kills characters from series!) and Aornis' mindworm and the plot device Thursday bought for Landen's novel and and and...