Lost in a Good Book
Jasper Fforde
399 pages
published in 2002

Lost in a Good Book is the sequel to The Eyre Affair, continuing the adventures of Thursday Next. It is slightly less manic than its predecessor, somewhat more structured and therefore much more enjoyable. There is still a touch of the kitchen sink to Fforde's plotting thought, a tendency to heap plot upon plot and idea upon idea, not always in such a way that it works. Nevertheless, it is an improvement on The Eyre Affair. As was the case with that book, this was a fairly quick read; I finished it in little more than the time it took to get to and from my brother's birthday party (roughly an hour's travelling each way).

If you have read The Eyre Affair, you know that it was more or less a stand alone novel, with most of the plot resolved at the end of the novel. With Lost in a Good Book this is much less the case, being the first of a trilogy to which The Eyre Affair can be seen as the prologue, one unresolved plot point of which drives much of the action in this book.

At the start of the novel Thursday Next is still a Special Operations literary detective, but having gained some fame due to her part in the Eyre Affair, where thanks to her uncle Mycroft's Prose Portal invention, she managed to get inside Jane Eyre, not to mention lock up her enemy Jack Schitt in a copy of Poe's The Raven. Now Goliath Cooperation, his nefarious employers, want him back and are blackmailing Thursday in returning him from The Raven, by eradicating her husband Landen Parke-Laine from history:s he'll get him back once Jack Schitt is returned to Goliath...

Meanwhile her adventures inside fiction have not gone unnoticed and Thursday's approached by JurisFiction, the law enforcement agency that maintains the law within books. She's apprenticed to Miss Havisham, from Dicken's Great Expectations. By becoming a member of JurisFiction, Thursday will be able to travel into books at will, hence be able to return Jack Schitt from his prison and so rescue her own husband.

In the meantime there are three more problems Thursday has to dealt with. First, she's pregnant with Landen's child. Second, her supposedly eradicated timetraveling father warns her the world will end soon, with every living creature being turned into Dream Topping, a form of whipped cream. Finally, there's also the riddle of Yorrick Kaine, who has managed to discover a lost play of Shakespeare just in time for him to win the upcoming elections, thanks to the "Shakespeare vote", which is quite important in the somewhat alternate England the Thursday Next series is set in...

Lost in a Good Book ends in media res, with some of the problems Thursday had to solve being resolved by the end of the novel, but with Thursday still being down, though not out quite yet. As with The Eyre Affair I found this entertaining, though not as funny as it clearly wants to be. In some ways Jasper Fforde reminds me of Tom Holt, in that both are trying hard to be funny and imaginative, but often do not quite hit the mark.

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Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book, science fiction, book review