Read our interview with Jasper Fforde, best-selling author of the Thursday Next series.
from One of Our Thursdays is Missing; enlarged view here
THE BOOKS IN THE SERIES are (Book One) The Eyre Affair, (Book Two) Lost in a Good Book, (Book Three) The Well of Lost Plots, (Book Four) Something Rotten, (Book Five) First Among Sequels, and the latest, (Book Six) One of Our Thursdays Is Missing. Books 1–4 compose the first part of the series. The second part, which takes place mostly in the BookWorld (see below), began in Book Five but really gets going in One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, which is fairly easy to pick up having not read the other books.
ALTERNATE UNIVERSE 1
The RealWorld (aka “the Outland”)
The series opens in 1985 in an alternate universe. The Crimean War limps on, though at a semi-permanent impasse, and dodos are kept as pets. Everyone in the Republic of England is enormously well read, but don’t expect them to be smarter or better behaved than anyone you know. Yes, parents name their children after cherished authors and literary characters, but brutality and tedium continue unabated. Roving gangs of French Impressionists commit casual violence while Marlowe evangelists sermonize door to door that their man wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
England is a police state. wwhile it still has a Prime Minister and a government, much of the actual running of the country falls to the SpecOps, an overarching policing agency that handles portfolios “too unusual or too specialized” to be handled by the regular English police. Divided into 34 divisions, the work of the SpecOps becomes increasingly secretive the closer you get to SpecOps 1, the division that polices SpecOps itself. Much of SpecOps does not know what the other divisions of SpecOps do. Much of the media (the media other than books, that is) is state-controlled.
Meanwhile, the Goliath Corporation effectively sets the terms for the English government. Goliath is principally a weapons manufacturer, but the conglomerate also has its tentacles in most aspects of English life through its various subsidiaries. Though omnipresent, Goliath is also shadowy: it answers to no one, and while marketing itself as a benevolent protector of the English people, it leverages its already considerable financial and military power as a method of intimidation when in the midst of bald power grabs, which is always. Members of SpecOps are expected to work with employees of the Goliath Corporation, often on unelaborated orders from above.
THURSDAY NEXT, LITERARY DETECTIVE
The “real” Thursday Next
In the earlier part of the series, Thursday Next is a Literary Detective in SO-27, which is responsible for dealing with works of literature, often in cases of forged or stolen manuscripts. In the first book in the series, Thursday’s uncle Mycroft invents a “prose portal” whereby people in the real world can travel into the written page, which leads us to …
ALTERNATE UNIVERSE 2
The BookWorld; Fiction
This is the main conceit of the series: Within books there is a whole other world, called the BookWorld. What we think of as a book is just an interface between us and this other world that literary characters inhabit. The characters are like actors: they do lead their own lives when not being read, but they must perform their book when it is being read by someone in the RealWorld, or what the BookWorld calls “the Outland.” A character can give a good or a bad performance, and if something changes in that performance, that will in turn affect the text on the page. The plot of the first book in the Thursday Next series for instance, revolves around Jane Eyre being kidnapped from Jane Eyre. In the BookWorld esteem is largely based on readership, and characters try to play to what they think readers want.
At the opening of One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, the BookWorld undergoes an upgrade to Geographic Operating System 1.2 so that the books are now rearranged geographically by genre (see Fiction Island map, above). A genre war looms as Racy Novel is being denied proper characterization and is in turn withholding its supplies of metaphor.
The BookWorld has its own policing agency, Jurisfiction, which is where Thursday increasingly spends her time as the series progresses. This is all complicated with the arrival of the other Thursdays …
THURSDAY NEXT 2
The “written” Thursday
After she saves the world several times, a series of books is written about Thursday Next. So yes, there is a Thursday Next series within the Thursday Next series, and of course, because there are now Thursday Next books within the RealWorld, there is now a literary character named Thursday Next in the BookWorld. That wasn’t so complicated, right?
The “written” Thursday is not actually the first written Thursday, but that’s for another book. The second part of Fforde’s series deals primarily with the written Thursday as she tries to live up to her real counterpart and faces a mystery of her own in One of Our Thursdays Is Missing.
Read The Varsity’s interview with Thursday Next author Jasper Fforde.
