Big Fun in BookWorld: Jasper Fforde’s The Well of Lost Plots :: Essays Papers

Big Fun in BookWorld Jasper Ffordes The Well of Lost Plots The Well of Lost Plots is a highly entertaining romp through the strange, stock-still mostly familiar world from the imagination (and extensive reading list) of Jasper Fforde. This is the third take in a series that continues to grow. In the first two books, The Eyre interest and Lost in a honest Book, our heroine atomic number 90 Next is a literary detective for the Special Operations Network (or SpecOps) of the British Police Force. She verifies the authenticity of rare books and manuscripts, investigates thefts and other criminal behavior, and looks into anything out of the ordinary related to the literary world.Thursday Nexts world is our world with a few twists. c whollyable to the invention of time travel, and subsequent disruptions of the time line, things have turned out a little different in Thursdays mid-1980s England. For instance, when the series begins England is still fighting the Crimean War. This worl d is a strange mixture of high-tech and no-tech. The airplane was never invented, nor apparently needed. But mega-corporations such as the sinister and ubiquitous Goliath Corporation engage in genetic experiments that, among other things, reintroduce from extinction both the Dodo bird and Neanderthal man.In The Eyre Affair Thursday discovers that she has an unexpected talent she can read herself into books. She discovers BookWorld, the world behind the world of fiction, where characters from literature have lives beyond the pages of their books. In Lost in a Good Book Thursday becomes an agent for Jurisfiction, the agency that keeps order in BookWorld. She is recruited by Miss Havisham (yes, from Dickens Great Expectations) and, in addition to retrieving a former confrontation from Poes The Raven, she manages to save all life on earth from turning into a gooey pink sludge.In The Well of Lost Plots, the third book of the series, Thursday is living in BookWorld hiding out from the G oliath Corporation and hoping to find some peace and quiet. What she finds instead is bureaucracy, politics, intrigue, and a messy underworld all of which fuel the creative process of fiction writing. When Jurisfiction agents start dying in freak accidents, Thursday begins an investigation that leads her to uncover corruption at the highest levels in BookWorld.This series is the embodiment of metafiction, which The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition (http//www.dictionary.com) defines as fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with the writing of fiction or its conventions.