Cultural Dessert

'One of Our Thursdays is Missing' by Jasper Fforde

7 December 2012

Halfway through reading Jasper Fforde’s latest Thursday Next novel, 'The Woman Who Died a Lot' (reviewed here in April 2012), I realised I had missed the previous book in the series. Regular readers may remember that I started reading the series in reverse order so reading the latest two books backwards seemed an appropriate continuation, in keeping with the surreal complexities of the books themselves. I have now finished reading ‘One of Our Thursdays in Missing’. Thursday Next is largely absent from this novel which is set in the ‘bookworld’ and features the ‘written Thursday’ – the fictional version of the literary detective – who is called into action to investigate the real Thursday’s disappearance. This is a very silly, and incredibly confusing, exercise in surreal meta-fiction, which owes a debt to ‘Don Quixote’ (reviewed here in January 2012) but takes the conceit much further. Fforde’s development of the bookworld into a geographical form, with the possibilities of journeys across genres, demonstrates the thinking which led him to create the post-apocalyptic world of ‘Shades of Grey’ (reviewed here in April 2011). I suspect you either love or hate this kind of thing but I’m really looking forward to the next adventures of Thursday Next.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 3:29 pm