Lost in a Good Book
Article in The Sunday Times
By Stephen Armstrong, July, 2002
Jasper Fforde's fantasy bestseller is threatening to kill off the novel as we know it. Oh no, not again, says STEPHEN ARMSTRONG.

Jasper Fforde's second novel, Lost in a Good Book, was published on Thursday July 18, and sold out its entire hardback print run by 4pm. Not bad for a bloke who has written five un-published novels and received 76 rejection letters for his troubles. His first book - The Eyre Affair - sold almost entirely by word of mouth. Sound familiar? Yup, basically, he is this year's grown-up JK Rowling.

Actually, the comparison isn't a bad one. Fforde's books are quasi-fantasy romps. They are set in 1985 in an absurdist alternate universe where Wales is a socialist republic, the Crimean war is still being fought, literature is as big as rock'n'roll and the vast Goliath Corporation has executive seats in the British cabinet. Fforde's Harry Potter is a literary detective called Thursday Next who prevents fictional characters being kidnapped from their original manuscripts, and his Hogwarts Castle is, um, Swindon.

Unlike the fabulously wealthy Ms Rowling, however, Fforde's merchandise has so far been restricted to bizarre and fantastic items from the world of Thursday Next that can be won only in competitions on the website (www.thursdaynext.com) that Fforde has created and regularly updates. It includes the official website of the evil Goliath Corporation, and that of Next's employers, SpecOps, as well as Next's own site. Between July 8 and 21, 284,000 people logged on to the combined sites and 4,377 of them stayed.

First of all, the site sells the books. But where it becomes interesting is in the way it alters your perception of Fforde's world. For one thing, Fforde has set about the town of Swindon with a camera and created a visual version of his surreal world. Surfers can apply to join SpecOps, take tests to see if they would make the weapons division, explore the technology of the Goliath Corporation and solve its own fiendish puzzles. You get the feeling that reading the books gives you only half the story.

"We live in an increasingly visual age," Fforde explains. "Forty years ago, everything was text-based. Even newspapers barely had one picture per page. The potential to increase readers' experience of an absurdist universe by creating impossible pictures means you are changing their experience of the story. You're allowing them to inhabit the stories rather than simply read them. The discussion forum on the site has already started giving me ideas for future books, and I've auctioned a part in one of the books for charity, which actually changed the way the novel ended."

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Of course, the world of literature has regarded new media with terrified fascination since its inception. While interactive novels usually read as badly as you would expect them to, some academics have been fearful of the effect of interactivity on the narrative form. The illusion of control that new media gives its user means that a whole generation is growing up believing that they can affect the outcome of stories. They decide whether Lara Croft lives or dies - so what will happen when they encounter the restrictions of the novel?

"The debate in academic circles at the moment is really divided between the narratologists and the ludologists," says Dr James Newman, a lecturer in media and communications at Edge Hill college in Ormskirk. "Narratologists think that computer games tell a story. Ludologists believe that they are more about experiences in virtual space. If you say that people's lives are narratives - that our experiences become a story in their own right - then games can fit that definition. Games are about people struggling to react to their environment rather than following a defined path through it. It's the opposite of narrative as seen by film-studies theorists, but it's close to narrative as most people live it."

"There are curious similarities between the French medieval court's chansons de geste and today's video-game narratives," agrees Dave McCarthy, news editor at the video-games magazine Edge and a former medieval scholar. "The chansons were song cycles like Beowulf that would be told at court to the young men. They were concerned with quests and adolescent ideals of romantic love, in much the same way as video games such as Mario 64 or Final Fantasy, where the quest is all."

McCarthy connects these song cycles with today's novels, films and poetry, arguing that their performers could no more look forward and see the way the novel would evolve than we can see new narrative forms springing up from games and the net.

"There is a generation who are happy with MP3s and don't want a CD on their shelves," he points out. "They are used to fragmented game narratives, where time is chopped and spun. In fact, 1960s postmodern concepts of the carved-up narrative become part of their everyday story experience."

Jonathan Coe, author of What a Carve Up! and The House of Sleep, remains unconvinced, offering hope for the next generation of Ffordes already on their third rejected manuscript. "There will always be something deeply satisfying in putting ourselves in the hands of another narrator, and that can never be replaced," he argues. "It gives us that sense of finality and closure that we seek from stories. People turn to art because they are baffled and scared by the randomness of life, and the story will always be able to provide solace from that fear.

Lost in a Good Book (New English Library Pounds 6.99)