bibliogramma | Who is Jasper Fforde… (Reply)

... and why does he write such unclassifiably fascinating novels? I really can't answer this question, but I'm very glad that he does.

Imagine a universe in which books are very, very important (instead of various Christian fundamentalists going door-to-door proselytising, in Mr. Fforde's universe, that knock on the door is likely to be from someone trying to convince you that it was Roger Bacon who wrote the play attributed to Shakespeare). And their characters really do have lives of their own. And the government would actually need to have a force of special operatives, including time travel operatives (as well as many other strange things) in order to prevent people from messing around with the Shakespearean canon, or kidnapping Jane Eyre.

That's just the tip of the iceberg of strangeness gone far beyond simple absurdism that is to be found in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next mysteries:

The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten

It's also a world in which werewolves and other such creatures exist, dodos and Neanderthals have been resurrected via genetic engineering, the Crimean War is still being fought in the 1980s, and... well, I really could go on and on, but that would take a lot of space and time.

And I haven't even gotten to the best things about the books. They are funny. Hilariously, screamingly, quite literally ROTLFMAO funny. They are also delightfully vicious satires on just about everything, from afternoon tea to fascist governments and megalithic global corporations. And there's a literary pun, reference, parallel or allusion in almost every paragraph.

Mr. Fforde has obligingly provided links to reviews of all the books on his own website, which you are invited to peruse if you want to see how other people have tried to describe them.

But I heartily recommend that you just read the books. Because no one can really describe them.