Lost in a Good Book
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| Newer UK Cover Design | |
| Author | Jasper Fforde |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | A Thursday Next Novel |
| Genre(s) | Literary Fantasy |
| Publisher | Viking Adult |
| Released | |
| Media Type | |
| Pages | 416 |
| ISBN | 0-340-82467-0 |
| Preceded by | The Eyre Affair |
| Followed by | The Well of Lost Plots |
Lost in a Good Book is a Fantasy by Jasper Fforde.
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
It is the second book by Jasper Fforde and the sequel to the adventures of literary detective Thursday Next in The Eyre Affair. Lost uses a variety of literary allusions as it follows Thursday through a vast government conspiricy.
[edit] Plot summary
Three months after the events of The Eyre Affair, Thursday Next is happily married to Landen Parke-Laine and working as a literary detective out of Swindon. One day, Thursday meets her father, a renegade ChronoGuard, who informs her that the world's going to end. Everything will turn to Dream Topping, a whipped cream-like confection, when one of her uncle Mycroft's inventions goes out of control. After the events of The Eyre Affair, Mycroft destroyed the Prose Portal he'd built, and retired leaving the invention business in the hands of his two well-meaning but inept sons, Orville and Wilbur.
Thursday is sent with a partner to the mansion of a front-runner in the up-coming election for President. In his extensive library, they discover an original manuscript of Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio. Tests done at the station determine its authenticity, and it seems to have appeared just in time to help its discoverer, Yorrick Kaine, to win the election (thanks to the "Shakespeare vote"). When he releases the play to the general public, victory is all but guaranteed.
The Goliath Corporation, a Big Brother-like agency that de facto rules England, lost one of their key employees in Poe's The Raven, thanks to Thursday in The Eyre Affair, and resorts to persuading a ChronoGuard agent named Lavoisier to eradicate Thursday's husband Landen from the time line. He vanishes, and only Thursday remembers him. But she also has physical proof -- she's pregnant with their child. Representatives from Goliath blackmail Thursday by offering to retrieve Landen if she'll bring their missing agent out of The Raven. Without the Prose Portal, however, she'll have to learn a new way to travel between books.
During one of her dreams, she encounters Landen in her memory, who spurs her to travel to Osaka to meet Mrs. Nakajima, a woman who's learned how to travel through books. Taking a Gravitube (a subway system that travels through the earth's core) there, she meets Mrs Nakajima, who introduces her to Jurisfiction, a police force run within fiction novels, composed of literary characters and real people. Notable members include the Cheshire cat, the Red Queen, Ambrose Bierce and Voltaire. Next herself is apprenticed to Miss Havisham, the abandoned bride from Dickens' novel Great Expectations. Thursday becomes a trainee Prose Resource Operative and taken through the book to the Great Library, where literary characters are dispatched through books to ensure that they unfold as they should.
After escaping the Byzantine Kafka's The Trial and saving Abel Magwitch from drowning before the beginning of Great Expectations, Havisham and Thursday part ways and the latter character enters "The Raven" and retrieves Jack. But Goliath have no intention of keeping their word, and they trap Thursday in a Corporation warehouse where there is nothing she can read to get out. Miss Havisham finds her there when it's discovered that Cardenio was stolen from the Great Library (a building where copies of every book ever written are kept) by another literary character. They find one of Thursday's clothing labels, which they read to escape.
Through her travels, Thursday found the event that caused the Dream Topping accident -- or rather, the person. Being guided through her dreams and memories by Landen, Thursday notes the presence in every scene of "coincidence." The coincidences lead her to Aornis Hades, Acheron Hades' sister who wants revenge on Thursday for Acheron's death in The Eyre Affair. Aornis can edit people's memories so they don't remember her presence, which is why Thursday needed help from Landen to find Aornis in her own memory.
Cardenio is retrieved and the Dream Topping is stopped, but Aornis escapes and now Goliath, the ChronoGuard, and SpecOps all seek to apprehend Thursday on Goliath's contrived charge of stealing corporate secrets. At the book's end, Aornis offers Thursday a choice: kill herself and Aornis will prevent the world from turning into Dream Topping. However, Thursday is saved by her father, who takes her place by sacrificing himself to take the Dream Topping to the dawn of Earth, where it--and he--will supply the organic nutrients needed to create life.
Afterwards, Thursday returns home and finds her father there. She is confused until she realizes that, being a time traveller, he will sacrifice himself much later in his future, even though it was just a little while ago in hers. Now that she is wanted by Goliath, the ChronoGuard, and Aornis, her father offers to place her in an alternate reality for a while (our reality, ironically) while she gives birth to Landen's baby. Refusing her father's offer, Thursday travels to a book in the Well of Lost Plots -- a subdivision of the Great Library that contains unpublished and unfinished works -- in order to take a year's maternity leave with her memory of Landen.
[edit] Characters in "Lost in a Good Book"
- Thursday Next
- Schitt-Hawse
- Landen Parke-Laine
- Akrid Snell
- Mycroft Next
- Wednesday Next
- Polly Next
- Tuesday's Father
- Miss Havisham
- Cordelia Flakk Spec Ops PR Agent
- Victor Analogy Head of Swindon LiteraTechs
- Agent Spike Stoker -- SO27 Agent, friend of Thursday, pays her 600 quid to help him for one night
[edit] Major themes
~thematic description~
| Novels by Jasper Fforde | |
| Thursday Next series | |
|---|---|
| The Eyre Affair | Lost in a Good Book | The Well of Lost Plots | Something Rotten | The War of the Words (unpublished, due July 2007) | |
| Jack Spratt series | |
| The Big Over Easy | The Fourth Bear | |
