Jasper Fforde: A Novelist Who Writes for Himself
Interview in The New York Times
By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN March 30th, 2002
For a link to the interview on the NYT site, click HERE
For 14 years before he became a successful novelist, Jasper Fforde worked in the movies, not as a writer but as an assistant cameraman. On films like "Quills," "Goldeneye" and "The Mask of Zorro," he was a focus puller, standing behind - or rather to the side of - the camera, setting the distance between lens and star. But when he was not on the set, he would write.

"I would work on a film for six months, and then take as long as I could off, conserving my money and writing," Mr. Fforde, 41, said recently. "I started with short stories, to try to teach myself how to do it better. The stories got longer and longer and became a novel. And one novel became four. But no one wanted to publish them. I didn't know whether I was ever going to get any of my books published."

His fifth novel, though, was "The Eyre Affair," and it was his breakthrough. A combination of fantasy, comedy, science fiction, Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis Carroll, Monty Python and even "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," it is set in England in 1985 in an alternate universe where the Crimean War has been raging for more than 130 years, dodos are pets, there are no jets, people can travel into and out of famous novels, high literature is mass culture, devotees of John Milton change their names to his, and the public is obsessed with the question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays.

The prime character is a female literary detective called Thursday Next - so named because Mr. Fforde's mother would always describe the Thursday to come as "Thursday Next" - who with her partner, Bowden Cable, pursues an arch villain, Acheron Hades, who has kidnapped Jane Eyre from the pages of the Charlotte Brontė novel. Without its first-person narrator, all pages in all copies of "Jane Eyre" turn blank.

A critical and popular success in Mr. Fforde's native Britain, "The Eyre Affair" was recently published in the United States by Viking and was on the New York Times best-seller list on March 10. Michiko Kakutani in The Times said that after a slow beginning, Mr. Fforde finds "his own exuberant voice" and immerses the reader in "a distinctive and entertaining fictional world."

Sitting in a conference room in his publisher's office in downtown Manhattan in work shirt and jeans, Mr. Fforde, blue-eyed and youthful, still has the appearance of a jovial assistant cameraman rather than a successful author. It's as if his best-sellerdom is too new to have become part of him.

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His sudden change in fortune, he said, can be attributed directly to his experience of failure. "After those first books I really felt I could write whatever I wanted, because it wasn't going to be published anyway," he said. "So I wrote `The Eyre Affair' basically for myself."

He began, he said, with the premise that there would be two literary detectives and that Jane Eyre would be kidnapped.

"I used `Jane Eyre' not only because it's been a firm favorite of mine for a long time but because she is such a wonderful heroine," he said. "She broke the mold of female heroines. I of course immediately realized that this story couldn't exist in our world, so rather than change the plot to fit our world, I thought I would change the world to fit the plot."

To create that world, Mr. Fforde said, he relied on his great interest in "stuff."

"I love facts, and whenever I see something interesting I like to use it," he said. "I take little bits from here and there and mix them together, make them interlock like a jigsaw puzzle, try to weave the strands together in a logic that could be understood.

"I had been reading a book about the Crimean War, and I thought, why not use it? Why not say that it's this long, attritional war and weave that into a political theme involving England, and see where that takes me. And then I had to make the war fit in with the kidnapping of Jane Eyre. I like to start with a small idea and build on it. It's ideas begetting ideas."

The character of Thursday Next came about, Mr. Fforde said, in part "because I think it's more fun to write about girls than it is to write about boys."

Critics have called his female detective a mix of Bridget Jones, Nancy Drew and Dirty Harry. "She's a feisty heroine like Jane Eyre, who is very strong at times but also a bit weak romantically," Mr. Fforde said. "Where does she come from? I suppose we writers make up characters we would like to know or be in love with or have love us."

Mr. Fforde was born in London in an upper-middle-class family, his father an economist, his mother a voracious reader who did charity work. "There were always tons of books around the house," he said. "My mother still gets through three books a week."

The first book he remembers borrowing from the library was, appropriately, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." "I still have a copy," he said. At 11 he was packed off to boarding school in Devon in southwest England, and at 18 he left school to try to get a job in the film industry.

"From the time I was 10 or 11 I wanted to be in films," he said. "So going on to higher education didn't hold any interest for me at all. It was slowing me down."
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After two years of trying, he got his first film job, in the early 80's on the set of "The Pirates of Penzance" with Kevin Kline, Angela Lansbury and Linda Ronstadt. "I made tea and coffee," he said. He slowly moved into camera work. And then between films in the mid-80's, he decided to learn to fly.

"Perhaps that's what led to my writing," he said. "Flying was something I had always wanted to do, even before I wanted to work in films. It's a great achievement. You are thousands of feet above the earth in command on your own in an aircraft. Maybe that's what made me realize that you can really do whatever you set your heart on. When you're 18 or 20 you don't always have a huge amount of confidence. You think that writing might be too difficult a career to pursue. I think the writing started because I finally realized I could do it."

Mr. Fforde lives in Wales with his companion, Mari Roberts, and when he's not writing, he spends his time flying above the Welsh countryside in his 1937 DeHavilland biplane. He maintains a Web site for "Eyre Affair" fans, JasperFforde.com. But writing is his focus. The second Thursday Next novel, "Lost in a Good Book," is to be published in Britain in July, and he is under contract for two more.

Naturally, he said, there is pressure now from his publisher and from within to keep up the success and to write more quickly.

"I have deadlines, which I didn't have before," he said. " `The Eyre Affair' took six years to write. `Lost in a Good Book' took a year. I used to have the leisure to rewrite again and again. Now I can't do that. And I know I will ultimately be annoyed that I couldn't write for another year before the next book was ready. But I'm just going to have to plug that into the equation and get on with it."