The first book Jasper Fforde remembers reading, he told the smiling crowd at BookPeople, is Alice in Wonderland. Which explains an awful lot. Fforde’s claim to fame, a series of novels starring literary detective Thursday Next, recalls Lewis Carroll’s cockeyed classic – and not just because of the repeated appearances (and disappearances) of the Cheshire Cat; it’s the books’ skewed comic perspective, relentless wordplay, and freewheeling surreality. This is, after all, a series in which characters slip into literary works as casually as Alice slides through the looking glass, dirigibles are the preferred means of air travel, Wales is a socialist republic, home cloning causes a glut of pet dodos, and audiences treat Richard III like Rocky Horror, shouting lines at the stage. Thursday’s first adventure involved rescuing Jane Eyre, who’d been kidnapped from her own novel. It’s quite mad.
But as madness goes, it’s delightfully unforced and offhanded, just like the author himself. In shirtsleeves and open collar, Fforde hardly looked the literary geek his books suggest he is, and his rapport with his audience was as light and easygoing as his attire. Fforde affably fielded questions; plugged his clever and hilarious Web site, www.jasperfforde.com; shared favorite puns; did a decent impression of Olivier as Richard III; and, naturally, read excerpts from his latest book, The Well of Lost Plots (Penguin, $24.95), in which Thursday goes to live inside a book, deepens her affiliation with the literary police force Jurisfiction, and, alongside its agents (including Miss Havisham from Great Expectations and Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle), contends with a runaway minotaur, rage-counseling sessions for the Wuthering Heights cast, and a labor dispute with nursery rhyme characters.
Much of the fun in Fforde’s books comes from these appearances by familiar figures from all corners of literature and his playful take on them. The ones he chooses to include, Fforde says, are ones he has “a great affection for.” But he hasn’t been able to use every character he loves. The H.G. Wells Estate blocked his use of a Morlock in Well, and a cameo by a doleful donkey from the Hundred Acre Wood was negated by a certain Mouse Factory. That’s why he tends to feature mostly characters in the public domain.
Fforde crosses so many genre borders within his novels that no one knows quite where to pigeonhole him. Mystery? Fantasy? Science fiction? Romance? He’s seen his books in just about every section but nonfiction. For his own part, Fforde says he writes nonsense, placing himself in the British tradition that stretches from Jonathan Swift to Edward Lear to the Monty Pythons.
Which brings us back to Lewis Carroll. Fforde infformed us that he still has that copy of Alice that he first read as a child. That comes as no surprise. The Thursday Next novels make clear that he treasures books and everything about them – the stories, the characters, the objects themselves. What his novels really are, Fforde said that night, is “a celebration of reading.”
This article appears in March 12 • 2004.