In which time – and pretty much everything else, too – is out of joint.
Thanks to Tinka I discovered Friday that a new Jasper Fforde had hit the shelves. After a short (but frantic) search in town I could get on the bus home and start reading. Something Rotten is every bit as good as one could expect having devoured the previous three books. Thursday is back in reality having spent two and a half years inside fiction, but reality is a somewhat dodgy concept, and something is definitely rotten in the state of, uhm, England. This made me very happy, which seems callous, but really, unless something is rotten, how are you going to get a good story?
In fact, the only thing that didn’t make me happy about Something Rotten was the quote from The Guardian they’ve opted to use on the cover. «Jasper Fforde has gone where no other fictioneer has gone before. Millions of readers now follow.» Well, what’s the problem with that then? Well, the problem with that is that in Thursday’s universe a «fictioneer» is a renegade fictional character, a «page-runner» who has not only left his own plot, but has left fiction entirely and tries to pass for a real person. Did the reviewer in The Guardian really mean to suggest that that is what Fforde is? And what about the publicity department? Has Fforde ok’ed the quote? In which case, why? What have I missed?
Anyway, go read The Eyre Affair and go on from there…