Thursday Next Series, Jasper Fforde

I decided to wait and post about this series in one entry. Fforde wrote four books about his "literary detective" heroine, Thursday Next: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Rotten. They are set in England in a world that might-have-been, if Winston Churchill had not carried England through the Second World War.

Thursday, a Special Operations agent of the Literary Detectives, spends most of her days searching out forged Miltons and keeping Marlovites (those who think Marlowe penned Shakespeare's plays) from rioting. Then an operative from a high unit of Special Operations comes to seek her help. Acheron Hades, the archnemesis of the world as his name might imply, is plotting evil things, and Thursday can recognize him since he once was her professor. As events unroll, Hades and Thursday discover a way to travel into books, a feat Hades uses to blackmail the world when he threatens harm to Jane Eyre and Thursday uses to pursue Hades.

And that's just the first book. In subsequent books, Thursday battles more of the Hades clan (their names are Cocytus, Phlegethon, Lethe, Styx, and Aornis) and goes head-to-head with her country's personal evil corporation. She ends up living inside Book World, a complex fictional society where characters live and new stories are created. Ultimately, she has to save the real world from threats of its own and characters from the Book World.

Fforde creates an alternate England that provides a hilarious, witty, and sometimes scathing critique of the modern world. He throws in time travel, re-engineered extinct species, and full contact croquet just for the fun of it, and his novels are fun. However, I found his long sojourn to Book World very tedious. He creates a detailed set of rules and mores for his fictional world that fall flat after reading the parts that take place in the modern world. They tested the bounds of belief and were not always internally consistent. And, frankly, I ultimately did not care about the complexities of Book World. I wanted Next to get on with her life in the real world.

Still, I think this series (or at least the first one) is a must-read for any English nerd. How can you turn down a novel with Shakespeare vending machines?