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| Vol.
19 No. 9 September 26 - October 9, 2009 If you’ve read Alice in Wonderland and Wuthering Heights, you probably have your forehead wrinkled, your eyebrows raised, and your face sporting that “What? Is she insane?” look. But no, I haven’t gone insane. British novelist Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series are full of that, filled with brimming literary allusions, particularly from the English classic literature, and social commentary presented humorously that would surely make anyone laugh out loud. Fforde’s first book in the Thursday Next series, The Eyre Affair, begins the story of a literary detective named Thursday Next living in an alternate Swindon in 1984. In this version of London, there is a police force called Special Operations Network where Next is part of SO-27 or the Literary Detectives (sometimes called as the LiteraTecs). They are the guardians of literature because people change their names into famous writers like Will Shakespeare and John Milton to fool others. The LiteraTecs also are in charge to stop the brawls that can happen between two literature factions, for example, the Shakespearans start gang wars with other factions that challenge William Shakespeare’s authorship. Yes, I’m not kidding. That’s their gang wars. The line between fiction and reality starts to blur when Thursday receives a report that the original manuscript of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was stolen by notorious criminal Acheron Hades. (And in this universe, Jane Eyre has a different ending: Jane did not return to Thornfield Hall and marry Edward Rochester; she went with St. John Rivers to India—an ending which Thursday found foolish.) Thursday’s inventor uncle Mycroft Next built a Prose Portal, a time-machine-like invention that enables a person jump inside the fictional world. With the Prose Portal and the original Jane Eyre manuscript with Hades, the fate of the novel is hanging. If Hades changes anything in the original manuscript, all the other copies of the novel will change as well, and it is up to Thursday to stop it. This she did, but not without consequences: Thornfield
Hall was burned, Rochester became blind, and the madwoman Bertha Rochester
was killed. Thursday, believing that Jane and Rochester belong together,
followed Jane to the Rivers house before accepting The problem does not stop there, however; when the second book Lost in a Good Book starts, we find Thursday charged with a serious crime of Fiction Infraction (or majorly altering a novel’s original narrative) by the Jurisfiction—the policing force of the BookWorld. This starts Thursday’s life as a Jurisfiction agent of the BookWorld and at the same time a LiteraTec in the Outland (or the “real” world, our world). Throughout the course of the five novels in this series—the others are The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, and The First Among Sequels—Fforde tackles a lot of issues from the drop in reading rates to the absurdity and repetitive plots and narrative devices of current novels, and even socio-political issues like how multinational corporations control the world (or here, at least the whole of England, by the magnate Goliath Corporation). Fforde even comments on the politicians during election period in one scene where opposing candidates went into a debate show called Evade the Question, where points will be given to the candidate who can evade the moderator’s questions and additional points will be given if a certain candidate can turn his answer around to his advantage and political agenda. Sounds familiar? I bet we’ll be seeing that come May 2010. Fforde’s use of humor in his books gets his message across. His wordplay is also evident in all five novels, like that character Spike Stoker, the lone detective at SO-17 who takes care of errant vampires. A cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dracula’s author. His books also have intricate plotting and fast-paced action that are reminiscent of detective stories, but what really make Fforde exceptional are the little details—these little puns and wordplays—that he leaves to the readers. Want a sample? “Remember that craze a few years back in the BookWorld for sending chain letters? Receive a letter and send one on to ten friends? Well, someone is over-enthusiastic with the letter ‘U’. I’ve got a report here from the Text Sea Environmental Protection Agency saying that the reserves of the letter ‘U’ have reached dangerously low level—we need to decrease consumption until stocks are brought back up. Any suggestions?” ‘How about using a lower-case “N” upside down?’ said Benedict. ‘We tried that with ‘M’ and ‘W’ during the Great ‘M’ Migration of ‘62; it never worked.” “How about respelling what, what?” suggested King Pellinore, stroking his large white moustache. “Any word with ‘our’ ending could be spelt ‘or’, dontchaknow?” “Like neighbor instead of neighbour?” “It’s a good idea,” put in Snell. “Labor, valor, flavor, harbor—there are hundreds. If we confine it to one geographical area we can claim it as a local spelling idiosyncrasy.” I’m pretty sure most of you, particularly the English teachers, are snickering in that quote. Yes, we are part of that local spelling idiosyncrasy. And since there was a massive drop in the reading rates in London for the last years because nobody reads books anymore, the BookWorld and Outland authorities devised a way to make people pick up a book and read. Their solution: Turn the literary characters into something people enjoys watching—reality shows. Their first attempt: Pride and Prejudice Big Brother edition. By doing his commentary laced with intelligent humor, wit, and parody, his message gets across as effectively as the more “serious” writers. Readers, particularly fellow bibliophiles, will just read the sentences again and will end up laughing hard with the joke while realization dawns into them at the same time. Well at least I did. Robbie
Ann Jesser Eullo :: DLSU-D Home | :: Newsette Home | Last Updated: October 12, 2009 3:21 PM
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