First Among Sequels

Jasper Fforde

Hachette

Otago Daily Times, 2008

Whether objective reality exists or is something created by the act of perception itself is a mystery that has troubled philosophers and physicists for thousands of years.  A related question, and one that has fascinated me ever since I was a young girl checking the back of every wardrobe for a door to Narnia, is what happens to the world we create when we write?  This is addressed in Jasper Fforde’s First Among Sequels’, the latest in the series of Thursday Next detective series.

Set 14 years after Something Rotten, SpecOps has been disbanded, and Thursday is running her old Literary Crimes Division as a freelance venture under cover of a carpet business (and smuggling cheese across the Welsh border since both businesses are spectacularly unsuccessful at making money).  She is also still moonlighting in Jurisfiction and is currently charged with training Thursday6 (the sexy, violent, kick-ass Thursday Next, whom her editors wrote into the wildly successful Thursday Next series) and Thursday5 (the hippy-chick version in the now out-of-print novel Thursday wrote to show the ‘real’ her).  Both are hopeless.  

Meanwhile, novel readership is falling catastrophically, and a new genre, Reality Book Show (where readers vote chapter by chapter on the fate of characters in literary classics) is about to be launched.  Oh, and Friday is refusing to join the Chronoguard, which could mean the end of the world…

Those of you completely confused, think Terry Pratchett with a literary twist, and find the first in the series, The Eyre Affair. For those who already know and love Thursday, First Among Sequels is a glorious return to form.