Author: Jasper Fforde
Publisher: Viking
Genre: No
The third in a series:
The Thursday next series must be read in order. If you have not read the first two books yet, don't read this one. However, if you are planning on reading the first book, be warned: it is an excellent book; you will want to read the series; the series is not of uniform quality. Now, I don't want to scare you off from reading this series, because the first book is excellent. The second book is also excellent. The third book, in my opinion, jumps the shark.
Jasper Fforde writes good nonsense. The first and second books are set (primarily) in an alternate world where books take the place of television as the national leisure activity of choice. Thursday Next works in LiteraTec, the literary division of the police force. They watch for forgeries and foil book thieves, and are kept quite busy. Fforde constantly throws in random interesting facts about Thursday's world. We suddenly learn that vampires are real here, or that Neanderthals have been cloned from remains found in a bog and now fill service industry jobs. These feature for a chapter or two and then fade into the background. The book isn't about these things, they're just part of life in Thursday's world.
Unfortunately, as the series progresses Fforde becomes more and more obsessed with the silliest aspect of his universe: characters can travel into books and interact with the characters, affect the plot, and bring objects and people back. This is actually used to good effect in the first two books, but in the third Thursday moves entirely into the Bookworld, living in the Grand Library and joining Jurisfiction, the interbook police force.
Now, vampires and cloned dodos may be silly, but they've got nothing on the Library. Characters can leave their books, sometimes affecting the plot and sometimes not. They can only interact with visitors between chapters or they will be read by the general public, but there seems to be an infinite amount of time between chapters (yet they still go on strike for more vacation time). Books can't be traveled into unless they've been explored through a back door from another book -- but book people can travel freely between the books that are currently being written. No doubt Fforde could come up with a Unified Theory of Bookworld to explain why things work the way they do, but he never bothered. Things just happen because they help the plot, never because they make sense.
On the other hand, one of the great things about Fforde's books are the literary references. No doubt that's why he moved into the Bookworld; literary references galore, and quite amusing ones at that. If you enjoy the twisting of plots and the revisiting of familiar (and unfamiliar) characters, this book might even be an improvement on the first two.
I will mention one more annoyance I had with this book. The second book ended with major cliffhangers. By the end of the third book, not one had been resolved, and new subplots had been added. That's just bad planning.
There is one more interesting point that must be mentioned. The end of this book sets us up not only for the next Next novel, but also for the apparently unrelated The Big Over Easy, which is the first book in a completely different series.