Reviews TN4 - The Leeds Guide

Ever wondered what would happen if Jane Eyre were kidnapped and held hostage in the Socialist Republic of Wales? Dan Jeffrey found out when he visited the wonderful world of Jasper Fforde

Film directors are always borrowing ideas from other movies. Quentin Tarantino has made a career from it. But until recently it wasn't something that went on that much in books. Unless you count James Joyce's terrifyingly obscure references to Shakespeare, that is. Jasper Fforde has changed all that. And how. With the help of literary detective Thursday Next (now on her fourth adventure with Something Rotten ) Fforde's taken the canon and squeezed it till the pips have squeaked. That's Pip from Great Expectations , by the way. So far we've seen Jane Eyre kidnapped, visited the Well Of Lost Plots with Miss Havisham as our guide and journeyed into Just William . In the latest, Something Rotten , Hamlet's in the real world, and he's very unhappy with his depiction as a procrastinator. As usual, Thursday is in charge of trying to put things right, and that includes making sure that President-for-life George Formby isn't deposed by self-declared dictator Yorrick Kaine. Yes, that Yorrick.

And if you thought that synopsis didn't make sense, here's the author's attempt: "Okay, let's think. Right. The future of England is all tied up in the revealment of the prophecies of a 12th-century saint and the outcome of the World Croquet League Superhoop. It's rather strange to describe, but it does all make sense. " It does as well, in the end. But you can see why Fforde had so much trouble selling the'concept' to publishers ("people read the synopsis and went 'absolutely not, it's just complete and utter nonsense'"). He got 76 rejection letters in all.

Now, however, it's precisely the loveable oddness and total uniqueness of his writing which is responsible for his huge sales and fanatical fanbase. His stories are constantly discussed on various websites, proof copies of his books change hands for inordinate sums of money and one couple even called their daughter Thursday. Does he find it all a little, well, disturbing? "No, actually it's all very, very flattering. It's nice that people have so embraced the world and the characters to the extent that they'd name their daughter after Thursday. So I think it's wonderful. " But why are readers so taken by the stories? "I think people enjoy the humour and the fact that what I'm doing is tapping into a collective memory of us all. When you're reading and you have these little mnemonic markers come up from things that you read many years ago when you were growing up, it's like understanding in-jokes in movies or paintings:there's a feeling of the familiar, which is quite nice. "

Other writers must be kicking themselves for not coming up with the idea first. Think about it: he has the whole of literature to draw on for his subject matter. He can raid any book he likes (so long as the author's dead, I suppose - he wouldn't want John Grisham suing him) and do whatever he likes to whichever character. And each time he'll add a new group of readers to the ones he already has. After all, wouldn't you love to see your favourite fictional character revived and put through a completely new adventure? It rather makes you wonder how many Thursday Next books there might be. "Do you know, I'm not really sure. It's really a question of until I think people are tired of the ideas. But certainly there's two or three easily. " Who might he pick on next? "Well there's a Samuel Pepys kind of adventure, 'cos he had a very fortuitous two-week lapse in his diary. I thought 'well, I wonder what happened during those two weeks'. So that'll be the basis for some sort of skulduggery I'm sure. "

Sadly all this criss-crossing between the real world and the world of literary fiction is actually impossible, otherwise Fforde would fancy being an impostor at PG Wodehouse's Blandings Castle. But in the meantime he keeps himself amused flying his 1937 Tiger Moth aeroplane round Wales ("great fun, great freedom - real freedom")and trying to come up with ideas for the next book. However, if he does ever decide to retire Thursday Next, he could always return to his previous career as focus puller on feature films. He worked on movies such as Goldeneye and Entrapment , which was great fun except when he got the focus wrong:"No one notices when you get it right, but when you get it wrong, you're the angel of death. "

Though he's now retired from that and writing full time, in many ways he thinks it's all part of the same thing. "I tend to regard stories and poetry and theatre and movies and novels all as different branches of the storytelling tree. People say there's a big difference between them, but I'm not so sure. I think it's all stories basically. So I just moved from one area of the industry - the storytelling industry which is vast, of course - to another.."