Imaginative Fiction

A summer or two ago, I read The Eyre Affair. and it quickly sailed to the top of my "List of Favorite Books". This list is not to be taken lightly. It consists of (but is not limited to) the following:

The Golden Compass

Fahrenheit 451

Ender's Game

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Eyre Affair

You could head these under "Science Fiction / Fantasy", but I'm determined not to do so because I'm not putting books like Star Wars in here for a good reason. I prefer to head these books under the category of "Imaginative Fiction" -- books that completely blew me away with their worlds, their prose, and their stories. Books that repeat things I've already seen, and in an inferior way (see: The Giver), won't make it onto this list.

There's a reason The Eyre Affair is so damn good. The book, written by Jasper Fforde, takes place in an alternate 1985, where the Crimean War (of all wars) is still going on, and Great Britain is run by 32 variations of police -- "Special Operations". Thursday Next is a member of SpecOps-27, the Literary Detectives (LiteraTecs). That's all the backstory I'll give, and it's most of what I can give, because the story takes so many swerves and dives that it's a bit hard to keep track of what's what. Still, the book is surreal, witty, and (most importantly) one of the best tributes to the world of literature I've seen.

I walked into Lost in a Good Book hoping for a similar experience. (I mean, if Rowling could do it, why not Fforde?) First impressions were good -- Fforde throws us into the novel without much prose to explain backstory, which actually works for the scene; we only know as much as we need to about new characters. I'm sad to say that the book goes downhill from there. What we are treated to is essentially a reminder -- a "who's-who" and "what's-what" of the first book. For example, Thursday's uncle Mycroft (the genius behind the device from the first novel that let people jump into books) shows up for half a chapter and then exits the book. New characters are variations on the old ones. In fact, both of the villains are directly related to the last book's villains by blood, which turns the book into a kind of complicated revenge novel. The first book had varied characters with completely different motivations, but this one makes it all as same-y as the goo that threatens to destroy the Earth.

Oh, I forgot. There's also a plot to destroy the world. That annoyed me. As soon as there's a chance of the world's end where only one or two people are able to stop it, warning bells go off in my brain. Come on, it's about the most cliched plot ever. The first book, I think, had the idea to put all the stakes of the story around a famed work of literature instead. That was far more clever. Here, it feels like Fforde ran out of ideas. Heck, I feel like I'm running out of ideas, writing this. There's just not much to say about the book. It's the first one, without the charm, wit, or surreality. Subplots are recycled elements from the first book (such as the chapter with the undead). I went back to look, and even the most important subplot, the one with Cardenio (a lost Shakespeare play), is based on an offhand comment in the first pages of The Eyre Affair! One new device is interesting -- the entroposcope that alerts Next to a change in levels of entropy -- and while it certainly gets enough 'screentime', it's not enough to fix the book's inherent problems.

This book feels like a sequel -- nothing more or less. The writers of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy said in an interview that they'd used all their ideas for the first movie, and didn't know where to begin for the second and third. Like them, Fforde seems to be writing this book for sequel's sake -- or just to expand Next's world. While the book ties up the loose strand of how people can go in and out of books without a Prose Portal, I have no desire to read more, despite the several loose ends that are left at the end of this one. Fforde leaves us, basically, with a "To Be Continued" sign, and while I'd dearly love to see Next interact with past version of herself in First Among Sequels, I think this series has already lived past its prime, which is why I'm putting it to rest.