Big Fun in BookWorld: Jasper Fforde’s The Well of Lost Plots
The Well of Lost Plots is a highly entertaining romp through the strange, yet mostly familiar world from the imagination (and extensive reading list) of Jasper Fforde. This is the third book in a series that continues to grow. In the first two books, The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book, our heroine Thursday Next is a literary detective for the Special Operations Network (or SpecOps) of the British Police Force. She verifies the authenticity of rare books and manuscripts, investigates thefts and other criminal behavior, and looks into anything out of the ordinary related to the literary world.
Thursday Next’s world is our world – with a few twists. Due to the invention of time travel, and subsequent disruptions of the time line, things have turned out a little different in Thursday’s mid-1980’s England. For instance, when the series begins England is still fighting the Crimean War. This world is a strange mixture of high-tech and no-tech. The airplane was never invented, nor apparently needed. But mega-corporations such as the sinister and omnipresent Goliath Corporation engage in genetic experiments that, among other things, reintroduce from extinction both the Dodo bird and Neanderthal man.
In The Eyre Affair Thursday discovers that she has an unexpected talent – she can read herself into books. She discovers BookWorld, the world behind the world of fiction, where characters from literature have lives beyond the pages of their books. In Lost in a Good Book Thursday becomes an agent for Jurisfiction, the agency that keeps order in BookWorld. She is recruited by Miss Havisham (yes, from Dickens’ Great Expectations) and, in addition to retrieving a former enemy from Poe’s The Raven, she manages to save all life on earth from turning into a gooey pink sludge.
In The Well of Lost Plots, the third book of the series, Thursday is living in BookWorld hiding out from the Goliath Corporation and hoping to find some peace and quiet. What she finds instead is bureaucracy, politics, intrigue, and a messy underworld; all of which fuel the creative process of fiction writing. When Jurisfiction agents start dying in freak accidents, Thursday begins an investigation that leads her to uncover corruption at the highest levels in BookWorld.
This series is the embodiment of metafiction, which The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition (http://www.dictionary.com) defines as “fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with the writing of fiction or its conventions.