Jasper Fforde

This is the sequel to 'The Eyre Affair' which I admit to having had problems with - and I had some with this book too. The invention continues here with one thing piled on to another - now we have magnetic tubes that go through the centre of the Earth, for example, as a quicker means of travel than airships, even though aeroplanes have clearly been invented in this reality, because again a small one turns up in this story. The travel tubes are there to get Thursday quickly to Japan; no other reason as far as I can see.

If the alternative history and also time travel wasn't enough (Thursday's father is a time traveller classified rogue whom other time travellers are trying to arrest and do something nasty to), in this story, she is faced with her husband being eradicated by a combination of said time travellers and the corrupt Goliath Corporation who have changed history so that he was not rescued by his father as a baby. And her father tells her that all life on EArth will soon be changed to a pink gloop unless she can solve the reason why. Meanwhile, an unknown enemy is trying to kill her in various inventive ways.

I did feel a bit of sympathy for the character in this book as she is pregnant and badly missing her husband and the scene where she goes home and finds his elderly parents there and they turn her away is quite touching. I did also continue to enjoy the inclusion of dodos and the fact that her pet one Pickwick lays an egg. But the book does take off on rather boggling lines when it seems that Thursday can develop the ability to travel into books without the aid of an invention such as her uncle's Portal which was destroyed after the first book in the series. She then meets various wacky literary characters and is mentored by Miss Havisham. There is a lot of silly stuff such as a riot in a book shop where people are gunning each other down supposedly to get a good bargain.

I suppose one of the problems I have with this book and its predecessor is that it tries too hard to be clever and witty. Meanwhile, basic items such as grammar and plot quite often go by the by, and often, silly names substitute for characterisation. The book also doesn't adhere to its own rules - although it was clear in 'The Eyre Affair' that characters had to stick to the plot and dialogue of their book so that they had to be present in certain places to say certain words at certain times, in this one they can go gallivanting around and do all sorts of other things - although there is a Character Exchange programme to allow characters to escape the boredom of their roles by swapping with characters from other books, Miss Havisham was certainly missing from 'Great Expectations' for quite a while without anyone 'filling in' for her, and other characters do the same. So given all these reservations, I won't be reading any more in this series.… (mais)

First in a series about the Nursery Crimes Division, this is an extended joke on the theme of nursery rhymes, fairy tales and the police procedural crime novel, in a world where detectives are approved more for their ability to develop an interesting narrative, written up by their Official Sidekicks, rather than doing actual police work, and the temptation to embelish leads to exaggeration and even 'fixing' of results. In such a world, honest Jack Spratt (who eats no fat, of course), head of the NCD, stands out and is ridiculed and threatened with his division's closure, while his enemy, the top detective Chymes Friedland tries to engineer his downfall. Friedland wants a plum case - the demise of Humpty Dumpty - and does everything possible to discredit Spratt to get it transferred to him, even though he normally belittles the nature of NCD cases and so it is a mystery why he wants it, something never explained.

Lots of nursery rhyme characters appear and the odd fairy tale one such as Rapunzle. There are a few other characters, though refreshingly after the Thursday Next punning ones, some have normal names such as Briggs. I didn't find the world in which this is set quite as wearing either, since it doesn't have time travel/travel into books/constant overload of nutty happenings. Although it vaguely fits into the same universe as the Thursday Next books - at one point, Spratt's DC is driving and pulls out into a road whereupon she is hooted at by a colourful sports car which readers of the (I think second) Thursday Next novels may remember happened from Thursday's perspective - she hooted at a car that pulled out and steered round it - there isn't the everpresent Goliath Corporation and weird inventions etc that are such a fixture of the Next novels. This series is more 'normal' in that respect and takes its form from the police procedural genre albeit with magic beanstalk and other fantasy features. The main issue with it is that it does go on a bit too long, with a lot of repetition of Spratt and his DC Mary Mary going to see various people and interviewing them, and then working out a bit more of the case - I know that is the genre but it did seem rather slow in development. As with the Next books, none of the characters are 'real', with the possible exception of Jack who has a bit more development with a home life shown, wife, children and lodger, though he still isn't very convincing as a real person.

In short, the book is a lightweight entertaining read - some of the funniest bits are the extracts from faked up publications which head the chapters - but not a keeper and I'm not interested enough to read another in the series.… (mais)

A re-read, having read this some years ago, and unfortunately I think I enjoyed it more the first time around. There are shedloads of ideas: an alternative history in which Germany occupied Britain in WWII, the Crimean war has persisted until 1985 with 'hot' periods, in one of which the heroine, Thursday Next, won a bravery medal for saving comrades but didn't manage to save her brother Anton, and a Goliath Corporation that controls the government and society. There us also organised time travel by a special operations unit.

Thursday is a detective in another special operations division which deals with literary crime, and this alternative society is art-mad, with people lionising dead poets such as Milton to the point of changing their names to match, and riots breaking out between surealists and adherents to representational art. Genetic engineering is so advanced that extinct species such as dodos have been brought back as pets, although there are only a few aeroplanes and most travel is by airship (at least until we reach book 2 in the series). Thursday's uncle Mycroft is a genius inventor in the Professor Branestawm line and one of his inventions, the Prose Portal, in conjunction with the bookworms he engineers, allows real people to travel into works of literature, but things go wrong when a villain Acheron Hades steals the device, kidnaps Mycroft (and his wife Polly who is trapped in a Wordsworth poem by the action) and then holds the world to ransom by killing off a minor Dickensian character and ultimately kidnapping Jane Eyre.

On paper that's a lot to like. And yet ... the use of silly names for everyone does get a bit wearing after a while. None of the characters seems real, they are all quite cardboard including Thursday herself so you don't feel involved in her various predicaments. The villain is evil because he likes being evil. The Prose Portal isn't really such, or it wouldn't work for poetry either. The constant witty inventiveness grates after a while - a Rocky Horror type version of Richard III for example, is one of the things just thrown in to pep up the mix and perhaps disguise the fact that the plot and characterisation are thin. And the cliches extend into scenes such as when the heroine looks into a mirror so she can describe herself. Plus it is meant to be her story from her POV and yet there is constant head hopping or describing things from the POV of other characters when she isn't present. There is a 'will they, won't they' subplot with an old flame who Thursday busted up with 10 years before due to his testifying to the military that her brother caused the disaster - a more modern Charge of the Light Brigade - in which he and others died and the old flame lost a leg - when he pointed to the wrong valley, only here it happened in 1975 and is the 'Charge of the Light Armoured Brigade'. There is too much inventiveness really, with things rushed or mentioned in passing, and no real development to the characters or the world, perhaps because the world can't really made to work and would be obviously nonfunctional if there was more of a focus on all the zany details.

So despite the dodos which I love this can only reach a 3 star rating.… (mais)