One Of Our Thursdays Is
Missing
Jasper Fforde
Hodder 2011 388
Pages
What if characters in books
had a life of their own when no-one was reading the books they inhabited? The marvellously
named Jasper Fforde runs (all over the place) with this meta-fictional conceit
in the inventively whimsical One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing.
His BookWorld is a meta-textual
realm (a vast planet? dimensional plain? or alternative universe?) inhabited by every fictional character ever
to appear in print and where competing genres – i.e. Racy Novel and Chick Lit –
often overlap and sometimes clash. A potentially cataclysmic all-out genre war
is in the offing, and to avert it requires the services of diplomat-detective
heroine, the real Thursday Next - who appears have permanently retired to the
Real World. Or has she? Her sudden disappearance a week before the peace talks could
be for reasons far more sinister...
The written Thursday Next,
filling in for the missing heroine in her novel, is hastily recruited to
investigate by the Fiction Police, also known as Jurisfiction. Under the guise
of being an occasional part-time investigator for the Jurisfiction Accident Investigation
Department , written Thursday takes up the trail from Conspiracy via Thriller –
and there recruits an unlikely ally, Sprockett, a wind-up clockwork butler with
a penchant for creative cocktail
combinations!
What follows is too enjoyably
convoluted to easily summarise, but the colourful cast of characters (such as Pickwick
the Dodo and Mrs Malaprop) and the hilarious exposition of fascinating facets (especially
for book nerds) of the BookWorld propel the story nicely onwards.
Fforde is very
funny, witty, and playfully tongue-in-cheek. He packs this meta-fictional
comedy with plentiful literary puns, allusions and metaphors. He also manages to imaginatively poke fun at
various targets that span self-publishing, fan fiction, e-books, etc. And his absurdist
parody of Agatha Christie is an absolute hoot that has to be read to be
believed!
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