In 'The Eyre Affair'. Jasper Fforde created a parallel universe in which there's a 578% duty on hard cheese, air travel never really took off, Wales is a socialist republic, and Swindon is a really exciting place to live. The book's heroine, literary detective thursday Next, is heading for cult status with her own dedicated website (www.thursdaynext.com) and a broad fanbase in the UK and the States. The second installment of the adventures of Thursday next, 'Lost in a Good Book', is published this month, with another two in the pipeline. Jasper Fforde lives in Wales.
What can you tell us about 'Lost in a Good Book'?
Suffice to say that Thursday discovers there is a policing agency within books that looks after fiction from within; this service is run by a mix of real people and fictional characters - Thursday is apprenticed to Miss Havisham from 'Greta Expectations'. Add to this the chance discovery of a lost play of Shakespeare's which is too good to be true, impending Armageddon, Neanderthals, a string of near-fatal coincidences and her husband who has been scrubbed from reality and relegated to Thursday's memory, and you get an idea of what it is all about... don't you?
Thursday came to fame for her adventures within the novel 'Jane Eyre'. If you had access to the prose portal, which novel or play would you enter and what would you do?
For starters, I'd go and find Godot which would spare us all a lot of trouble and a lot of waiting. I'd like to go and explain the plot to Othello so he doesn't keep on killing poor Desdemona and making an idiot of himself, and throw a big party for Boo Radley, who deserves it.
Your Books are full of puns and one-liners. What's the worst pun you've come up with?
I called a character 'Buckett' once, just so that I could say 'Buckett had turned a little pale...', which is quite a groaner. Puns at one time used to be at the cutting edge of comedy; I'm trying to revive them - or kill them stone dead for ever. One of the two.
Do you laugh at your own jokes?
Frequently. Someone has to. |
