★★★★☆ Thursday Next goes recursive

First Among Sequels

Jasper Fforde

We ended Something Rotten with what looked a lot like a resolution. We learned that Granny Next, who had been hanging around wearing blue gingham and looking for the ten most boring books ever written, was in fact Thursday herself in her old age. If you've read the previous books in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, nothing will surprise you less to learn that 110-year-old Thursday had somehow become a contemporary of mid-thirty-year-old Thursday and died happily in her presence. And if you HADN'T read the other books, you might think that this means that Thursday is going to survive to a grand old age and die peacefully, in the presence of her family. Happy endings all around!

But of course nothing is more labile than the past in the Thursday Next series. Thursday's husband Landen has blinked in and out of existence for most of the previous books. So, although I do suspect that Thursday's eventual fate will be as foreshadowed in Something Rotten, we're not there yet.

In First Among Sequels we seem to notice for the first time that a series of books about Thursday exists. That means that, in addition to the canonical real-life Thursday, there exist other Thursdays who are characters in the previous books, and that events in those books may be of interest to Jurisfiction and Jurisfiction agent Thursday Next.

In addition, something is happening in the book world. People are barely reading books any more. Ill-advised measures to combat this trend are imminent. And Goliath Corporation is also doing things that worry Thursday.

I debated the rating to give First Among Sequels. The biggest problem of the Thursday Next series, to my mind, is that it's exhausting. It is wild and unpredictable and funny, and that's why we love it. But at the same time there's always so much going on, and so many of the things we usually count on to keep our feet on the ground, such as linear time and clear ontological distinctions between physical reality and works of fiction, are thrown to the winds, that you reach the end of a Thursday Next novel with the sensation of having been on a 12-hour roller-coaster ride. I'm not sure it's possible to have too much fun, but if so, this is what it might look like. I was thus a little relieved that the ending of Something Rotten seemed to point towards a peaceful resolution. And it is certainly true that First Among Sequels has a more coherent narrative than the previous Thursday Next novels.

But it's one of those "Be careful what you wish for!" cases. While a coherent Thursday Next novel is a nice restful experience, reducing the roller coaster ride to a somewhat turbulent but almost straightforward story makes it less fun. I probably would have landed on three stars, except that Fforde managed to pull some rather lively rabbits out of his hat in the last third. (I was amused to see Dr Temperance Brennan making guest appearance. Not Kathy Reichs -- she doesn't appear, but her character forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan. That was fun.)

In the end, I landed on four stars. I think the series is winding down. But it's been a great ride!

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