Finished book three of the Thursday Next series on the plane back home.Unfortunately, Thursday's husband, who had been eradicated in Book Two, was not reactualized in this one either. It's like a soap opera now -- maybe the whole series will be her trying to make him re-exist. I hope it isn't.
At any rate, as with the previous books, Fforde shows his continued brilliance and imagination. Thursday is back as an apprentice with Jurisfiction, a sort of police agency that patrols the pages of books. She's supposed to be taking it easy while she's pregnant, hiding in the pages of a book that has never been published. There are all sorts of new and fascinating concepts in The Well of Lost Plots: a text sea, "Generic" book characters, characters who seem to want free will as much as a "role" in a book, a "mispeling vyrus," BookWorld Awards similar to Oscars, reading program upgrades similar to computer operating systems . . . the list goes on. It's SO COOL. The only thing I can draw a slight parallel to is Toontown, except with characters from books rather than cartoons; and even that seems to cheapen it somehow.
Personally, I found the idea of all the characters from Wuthering Heights being made to attend anger management class really, really hilarious.
The cool thing about Fforde's Next series is that it always keeps you guessing. At first I thought Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" would be a huge part of the plot, along with Thursday's brother not dying in the 180-odd-year Crimean War. But no.
On to Book Four!
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