The Fantastic Mr Fforde
Helen Lewis in fantasy not just for geeks shocker!
There’s a story that Jasper Fforde likes to tell to explain how he created an alternate and subtly bizarre universe for his whimsical comic novels. ‘Once there was a supermodel at a shoot in a disused warehouse,’ he tells audiences at book signings, ‘and she wanted to go to the loo, and asked where it was. The assistant on the shoot told her, “It’s over there – but there’s no door.” So the supermodel asked innocently: “Then how do I get in?”’
The audience laugh and the author pauses. ‘Thinking about that story – I’d love it if you looked at it another way, that there was a toilet in the warehouse, and everyone knew it was there, but it had been bricked up.’
Fforde has attracted hundreds of thousands of readers by creating a world which closely resembles our own, and yet at the same time is completely different. It’s a place where George Formby is the country’s much-loved president, where Winston Churchill was run over by a taxi before the start of the Second World War and where croquet is a big-money game.
More importantly, in this universe, altering a book’s original manuscript changes every copy, and literary characters need to be kept in check by a dedicated police force – which is where Fforde’s heroine Thursday Next comes in. In The Eyre Affair, the ‘literary detective’ is tasked with foiling a plot by master-criminal Acheron Hades to kidnap Jane Eyre, depriving her of a happy ending with St John Rivers (Mr Rochester, you say? Oh no, she doesn’t live happily ever after with that bigamous bastard).
Fantasy novels (if that’s what Fforde’s are) are often derided for their geekiness. The popular perception is that they’re what teenage boys read when they’ve grown temporarily bored with masturbation. If they’re funny, that must mean they’re not difficult enough, not worthy, not literary. And yet it would be hard to find any novels more literary than the Tuesday Next series, which counts Miss Havisham and the Unitary Authority of Warrington (formerly Cheshire) Cat as characters, and where the majority of the action takes place inside great works of literature.
But Fforde himself isn’t too bothered by his lack of acceptance by literary luvvies, seeing himself as a sort of grass-roots campaigner for the classics. ‘I find a lot of modern novels, high literature ... pretentious,’ he told an audience in Bracknell. ‘I find it claims to impart deep truths about life. I’m all mirth and no matter, and I like it.’
The Merry Wives of Elsinore
Jasper Fforde’s story reads like a publishing fairytale. The ‘novelist and aviator’ (as he’s described on Wikipedia) was born in 1961, and worked for many years as a focus puller on films including Entrapment and The Mask of Zorro. It was a job that he says included an awful lot of standing around telling stories – great preparation for life as a novelist.
He wrote seven novels in twelve years (and clocked up seventy-six rejection letters) before finding a publisher for The Eyre Affair. Now there are four Thursday Next novels (The Eyre Affair, Lost in A Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten) and two ‘Nursery Crime’ books (The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear) featuring detective Jack Spratt and his assistant, Mary Mary.
But success so nearly passed Fforde by. His agent and publishers quailed at the task of explaining the concept behind The Eyre Affair. You can imagine the conversations: ‘So, the heroine’s a dowdy thirtysomething … er … literary detective … living in an alternate-reality Swindon with a pet dodo? And it’s the eighties and the Crimean War is still raging? Right. And there’s a master criminal intent on using her wacky uncle’s invention to jump into literature and kidnap Jane Eyre? And people will care because in this world, literature is incredibly popular? Okay. What? Her father’s a time traveller? And it’s really about the eternal question of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? I see. Do you have anything with a daughter coming to terms with her father’s death at all?’
It’s phenomenally hard to explain the appeal of Jasper Fforde to other people, so now I tend to do what his agent did, and just give them a copy of The Eyre Affair. He’s been described as ‘pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy’ by Amazon and as offering ‘a cascade of puns, plays on words, surrealism, satire and verbal virtuosity’ by Marcel Berlins
in The Times.
Many early reviews compared Fforde with Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, something he is happy (but sceptical) about. However, it seems the tide is now changing and he told an audience at a book signing that he’s recently seen a new author described as ‘Fforde-like’. This delights him: ‘You know you’ve made it when you become lazy shorthand for book reviewers.’
Next please!
There’s something else exciting about Ffforde. For anyone tired of the type of modern author who seems to regard writing as painful torture and book promotion as even worse, Fforde makes a refreshing change. He clearly loves books, knows his favourite stories inside out and revels in the mystery of literature’s unanswered questions.
His attitude to publicising his books is equally positive, the years of rejection presumably still fresh in his mind. He stamps dedicated books – ‘it’s the frustrated librarian in me’ – with legends ranging from ‘Eat More Toast’ to ‘Sommeworld – Britain’s Finest 1st World War Themepark’. He also uses the proceeds from book and merchandise sales to print limited edition postcards, which trade briskly on eBay. I’ve got a typically bizarre one which came with my copy of The Fourth Bear – it’s a picture of a dwarf rabbit in a glass. The back reads: ‘This image demands only for the demanding art critic to go “Aaaah!” and nothing else.’ Wonder what it means? You’ll have to read the book.
And then there’s the website, which Fforde runs himself. At www.jasperfforde.com, you’ll find a sprawling, bizarre, vastly entertaining behemoth. It’s so vast an enterprise that it sometimes threatens to take up too much of the author’s time. ‘Ultimately, the web is a tool to facilitate my primary business of selling books and selling stories,’ Fforde told the Guardian. ‘I like to give the website as much time as I can, but it’s a conflict. It takes a huge amount of work, not only in writing it, but in Photoshopping images and other things. One series of pictures – the Seven Wonders of Swindon – took me about three weeks of solid work to complete.’
Fforde also refers to the website as providing an ‘after-sales service’ to his readers. Each book comes with ‘upgrades’ based on spelling and continuity
errors found by readers. One, for Lost in A Good Book, reads: ‘Go to page 41 and respell “neanderthalis” to “neanderthalensis”. This is of vital importance as a mispeling vyrus, once allowed a small toehold, can run though an entire book
like a forest fire. If you don’t beleive me, have a look at the Molesworth books by Willans and Searle.’
Despite winning the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, it seems Fforde has more time for his readers than the literary establishment and its accolades. In The Well of Lost Plots, which has its final showdown at the Armitage-Shanks literary awards, he launches a satiric attack on the entire industry. ‘It’s having a little go about modern marketing,’ Fforde told the BookPage website in 2004. ‘It’s about trying to get the formula right so we can sell it instead of trying to get the story right so people will buy it. Bookshops didn’t used to be about retailing and marketing, they just used to be about books. Now they seem to be very much about hard sell – this is what is selling, this is what you should read. That’s what I was sort of railing against.’
How then will Fforde cope with the increasing hype surrounding his books and sales which now number in the millions? Well, the answer seems to be that he will keep plugging away as he’s always done, going into ‘scribernation’ every winter and producing a new book every summer.
He says: ‘When I was first published I personally committed myself to a new book every year for ten years, and – publishers willing – this shall be so. If I’m still here in ten years, we’ll see if I can’t commit myself to another ten in another ten.’ Another Thursday Next book – The War of the Words (previously known as First Among Sequels) will be out next July, and the final Nursery Crime novel, The Last Great Tortoise Race, is scheduled for Summer 2008.
Just think: a truly original novelist, hilariously compulsive books which may well become collector’s items, and the warm feeling of intelligence that consumes you as you spot an obscure literary allusion. Why wouldn’t you read a Jasper Fforde book?
