Well of Lost Plots

Well of Lost Plots, Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde’s Well of Lost Plots is the third installment of his Thursday Next series, and it starts off more or less immediately where the former book, Lost in a Good Book ends. Thursday Next is a Jurisfiction Agent in a Great Britain similar to the one in our world, but with some notable differences.  Genetic engineering is quite common, and Thursday has a pet dodo she made with a home genetics kit. The series takes place in the 1980s, but the Crimean war is still raging. Wales is independent. Zombies, werewolves and vampires are all real, but more of a nuisance than anything else. Time travel is possible, but highly regulated by the Chronoguard. There are severe cheese shortages and cheese import laws. And the most relevant to the series, people take books seriously. Very seriously. Like, there is a special operations division, SO-27, dedicated to tracking down forged books and protecting literature. Oh, also, literary characters live in book world and have their own policing agencies to keep the plots as they’re supposed to be and sometimes people from the real world can enter the books and vice versa.

Well of Lost Plots is unique in the series so far in that it takes place entirely in the book world. And from here on out there will be SPOILERS for what has happened in the first two installments, and you have now been warned. At the end of Lost in a Good Book Thursday Next had been apprenticed as a Jurisfiction Agent policing book world rather than books in the real world, her husband, Landon, had been eradicated through time travel by the multinational Goliath Corporation, and she was somehow still pregnant with his child in this time stream. Thursday is less distressed by this part than many of us would be since her own father, a rogue Chronoguard agent, had been eradicated and still pops up in her life regularly. Sadly, Landon’s eradication seems to be somewhat more complete.

While she’s pregnant, and planning how to get her husband back, Thursday decides to take a break in Book World as a Jurisfiction Agent, subbing for a character in a seldom-read book while continuing to track down Page Runners (characters who escape their books), evading Grammasites (parasites who feed on words) and fighting off a plot to make all books far more generic and lifeless through what sounds suspiciously like e-books.

I’m constantly surprised that Jasper Fforde’s books are not far more popular. They’re incredibly witty and clever, the world building is truly impressive, and they are full of allusions and references that can only be understood for the overeducated types who have spent far too much time in our world’s paltry equivalent of Book World. There is absolutely no reason that nerdy hipster types shouldn’t be referring to Jasper Fforde constantly and bragging about how many of his jokes and references they understood. Each book is basically a novel of in jokes for literature and history nerds.

Well of Lost Plots is just as clever as the others, and Fforde is a talented enough writer to pull off all of this. It just works, you see. Oddly enough, Lost Plots was somewhat easier to understand than some of the others in the series, I thought, since it only takes place in Book World and one doesn’t need to try to keep track of all of the rules of both worlds. And, a further benefit for those of us who like to be in on the jokes, it sets up the Nursery Crimes series. One doesn’t need to have read one book to get the other, but having read The Big Over Easy definitely made me appreciate some of the bits of Well of Lost Plots more.

Anyone who spends too much time on books, especially classics, who enjoys being the smartest in the room, or who likes Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, or other witty British authors will likely enjoy all of Fforde’s work. He’s one of the more creative and imaginative authors I’ve read, and I’ve got the rest of the series waiting on my to be read shelf for the next year.