Master of the Next world

by Parvathi Nayar. November 8th 2002

Jasper Fforde tells PARVATHI NAYAR how he subverts literary classics to tell contemporary stories.

ORIGINAL Thought - or at least an original idea - is a good premise on which to base a novel. Kidnapping someone else's idea doesn't qualify, nor does a story about kidnapping, but how about kidnapping the leading character from within a novel? Now there's a thought, mused author Jasper Fforde, 'and if the novel was one that was written in first person, the whole book would go blank', he grins. These Machiavellian plots of literary diabolism translated into Fforde's acclaimed novel The Eyre Affair. Eyre, set in a sort of parallel universe to ours, features a LiteraTec - read literary detective - improbably named Thursday Next, who lives with her pet dodo. The Next world is a bookworm's feeding ground of literary delights. Here, elections are won and lost over arguments about Shakespeare, who actually wrote Shakespeare being a running theme; literature is the bona fide religion; books have a real existence, so it's possible to enter and engage with literary characters. Fforde, in town recently to promote his Next books, has been writing for 10 years. He wrote five books before Eyre got published, books in the same playful tone as Eyre; one examined the murder of Humpty Dumpty, another the premise of dragons living in the here and now. Eyre actually stalled for four or five years; his fingers sort of froze over the keyboard when he contemplated the literary heresy of putting new words into such a well-beloved character's mouth: 'Jane Eyre is such a wonderfully rounded, specific character; everything is there.' He solved the problem by having Eyre say very little, the story is centred around Ms Next, Mr Rochester and the third most evil man in the world, Acheron Hades. An aside: many recent follow-ups to famous books like Rebecca and Gone with the Wind have been quite, quite dreadful; Fforde's books work because they are so tangential: they revisit affectionately, extrapolate outrageously, never take themselves too seriously and are anchored by a certain healthy respect for the original material. Next's adventures progress in Lost in a Good Book. The main 'literary character' here is Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, the main discovery is that the book isn't formulaic. This bodes well for the rest of the Next series where he does intend to stick to the idea of visiting a different classic in each book.

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Why classics, apart from the obvious reason he seems to enjoy them enormously? 'People are familiar with them and there is no copyright,' he chuckles. Not that every classic is read-worthy, he admits honestly; there's a lot that's pretty boring like chunks of Moby Dick or Ivanhoe. He's even created a character, Granny Next, who has to read the 10 most boring classics before she can die. Fforde always liked stories as a child, his parents were avid readers and there were always books in the house. However, 'I got into classics in my 20s. I left school at 18, I don't have a University education'. Fforde opted out of University because he wanted to work in the movies; it wasn't easy, but eventually he got a wee toehold as general dogsbody in The Pirates of Penzance starring the then-unknown Kevin Kline. He then managed to move sideways into the camera department where he worked for 14 years in films like Entrapment and Quills. Not perhaps the most glamorous aspect of life in the movies, but it gave Fforde wonderful opportunities to travel - and to work with top names. One of his greatest thrills came from working in Golden Eye, which starred Desmond Llewellyn - the legendary 'Q' to Pierce Brosnan's James Bond. Is the mad inventor Mycroft in the Next novels - who creates the 'prose portal' that allows people to flit in and out of books - a tribute to Q? 'Of course.' What if Fforde had access to a hypothetical prose portal in our world? 'I'd go into Waiting for Godot,' he grins. 'I'd find Godot and bring him onstage, which would mean the play would end about two minutes after it started. Then all of us could go off and have dinner somewhere.' It's this spirit of frivolous fun that permeates his books. In a slightly elliptical elucidation of Robert Zemeckis' dictum that you can always write your way into the movies, Fforde is interested in moving Next from print to screen - but to small screen. 'I'd like Next to become 20 hours of TV, not 90 minutes of film - too much would be left out.' Next is a very personal project, and as a visit to his website reveals, it's a world that Fforde has imagined in vivid pictorial detail. His books, says Fforde, 'highlights the silliness of serious subjects in a gently satirical way, whether it's the government, religion or big business conglomerates. Because it was for my own enjoyment, I could write what I wanted. If I'd been writing to get published, then what I wrote would have become similar to what everyone else was saying. I wanted to have my work published - I didn't just want to be' published'. When Hodder & Stoughton finally published the books to great popularity, it was a vindication of his belief that 'people want to read quirky stories'. Fforde likes to communicate with these people who read his books in a personal way. For instance, occasionally, when he does guerilla signings in bookshops, he leaves a postcard in the book that's specially printed by him with Thursday Next references. He laughs how such cards are now becoming collectibles, and come up on e-bay. Readers often write in; many tell him they have gone back and read the classics after reading his books.

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Fforde reads a lot himself, he's also a qualified pilot of small planes. Since 1990 he's had a share in a plane; now he owns a little one that he keeps in Wales, where he's based. Whenever he has a moment to spare, he takes to the skies. Given that flights of fancy, time travel, back-and-forthing and rewriting of books within books characterise his narratives, Fforde approaches his novels by first writing a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline. Since he has a four-book contract that asks for a book a year, the intense writing phase can be an 8.30am to 10pm day - with a lunch break. As for research, it takes the form of extensive browsing in the virtual and real worlds of the Net and bookshops. 'The research is not for getting the facts right, but to come up with the facts at all,' he laughs. Next's world being an alternate universe, he can make up its rules as he likes. Like the idea of why coincidences occur, as explained in his second book: a Next world law that coincidences happen when there's a drop in the natural law of entropy or disorder. Odd? Zany? Far out? Sure - but that, after all is where Fforde's real success lies. In his ability to create worlds where the very odd becomes very believable. Jasper Fforde's books are available in major bookshops, at $17.95 each Parvathi Nayar Correspondent, The Business Times, Singapore.