Jasper Fforde's fantasy bestseller is threatening to kill off the
novel as we know it. Oh no, not again, says STEPHEN ARMSTRONG.
Jasper Fforde's second novel, Lost in a Good Book, was published on
Thursday July 18, and sold out its entire hardback print run by 4pm.
Not bad for a bloke who has written five un-published novels and
received 76 rejection letters for his troubles. His first book - The
Eyre Affair - sold almost entirely by word of mouth. Sound familiar?
Yup, basically, he is this year's grown-up JK Rowling.
Actually, the comparison isn't a bad one. Fforde's books are
quasi-fantasy romps. They are set in 1985 in an absurdist alternate
universe where Wales is a socialist republic, the Crimean war is
still being fought, literature is as big as rock'n'roll and the vast
Goliath Corporation has executive seats in the British cabinet.
Fforde's Harry Potter is a literary detective called Thursday Next
who prevents fictional characters being kidnapped from their original
manuscripts, and his Hogwarts Castle is, um, Swindon.
Unlike the fabulously wealthy Ms Rowling, however, Fforde's
merchandise has so far been restricted to bizarre and fantastic items
from the world of Thursday Next that can be won only in competitions
on the website (www.thursdaynext.com) that Fforde has created and
regularly updates. It includes the official website of the evil
Goliath Corporation, and that of Next's employers, SpecOps, as well
as Next's own site. Between July 8 and 21, 284,000 people logged on
to the combined sites and 4,377 of them stayed.
First of all, the site sells the books. But where it becomes
interesting is in the way it alters your perception of Fforde's
world. For one thing, Fforde has set about the town of Swindon with a
camera and created a visual version of his surreal world. Surfers can
apply to join SpecOps, take tests to see if they would make the
weapons division, explore the technology of the Goliath Corporation
and solve its own fiendish puzzles. You get the feeling that reading
the books gives you only half the story.
"We live in an increasingly visual age," Fforde explains. "Forty
years ago, everything was text-based. Even newspapers barely had one
picture per page. The potential to increase readers' experience of an
absurdist universe by creating impossible pictures means you are
changing their experience of the story. You're allowing them to
inhabit the stories rather than simply read them. The discussion
forum on the site has already started giving me ideas for future
books, and I've auctioned a part in one of the books for charity,
which actually changed the way the novel ended."