One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [1]
much else besides
1.
The BookWorld Remade
The remaking was one of those moments when one felt a part of literature and not just carried along within it. In less than ten minutes, the entire fabric of the BookWorld was radically altered. The old system was swept away, and everything was changed forever. But the group of people to whom it was ultimately beneficial remained gloriously unaware: the readers. To most of them, books were merely books. If only it were that simple. . . .
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (2nd edition)
Everyone can remember where they were when the BookWorld was remade. I was at home “resting between readings,” which is a polite euphemism for “almost remaindered.”
But I wasn’t doing nothing. No, I was using the time to acquaint myself with EZ-Read’s latest Laborsaving Narrative Devices, all designed to assist a first-person protagonist like me cope with the strains of a sixty-eight-setting five-book series at the speculative end of Fantasy.
I couldn’t afford any of these devices—not even Verb-Ease™ for troublesome irregularity—but that wasn’t the point. It was the company of EZ-Read’s regional salesman that I was interested in, a cheery Designated Love Interest named Whitby Jett.
“We have a new line in foreshadowing,” he said, passing me a small blue vial.
“Does the bottle have to be in the shape of Lola Vavoom?” I asked.
“It’s a marketing thing.”
I opened the stopper and sniffed at it gingerly.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Whitby was a good-looking man described as a youthful forty. I didn’t know it then, but he had a dark past, and despite our mutual attraction his earlier misdeeds could only end in one way: madness, recrimination and despair.
“I prefer my foreshadowing a little less pungent,” I said, carefully replacing the stopper. “I was getting all sorts of vibes about you and a dark past.”
“I wish,” replied Whitby sadly. His book had been deleted long ago, so he was one of the many thousands of characters who eked out a living in the BookWorld while they waited for a decent part to come along. But because of his minor DLI character status, he had never been given a backstory. Those without any sort of history often tried to promote it as something mysterious when it wasn’t, but not Whitby, who was refreshingly pragmatic. “Even having no backstory as my backstory would be something,” he had once told me in a private moment, “but the truth is this: My author couldn’t be bothered to give me one.”
I always appreciated honesty, even as personal as this. There weren’t many characters in the BookWorld who had been left unscathed by the often selfish demands of their creators. A clumsily written and unrealistic set of conflicting motivations can have a character in therapy for decades—perhaps forever.
“Any work offers recently?” I asked.
“I was up for a minor walk-on in an Amis.”
“How did you do?”
“I read half a page and they asked me what I thought. I said I understood every word and so was rejected as being overqualified.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I was also offered a four-hundred-and-six-word part in a horror last week, but I’m not so sure. First-time author and a small publisher, so I might not make it past the second impression. If I get remaindered, I’d be worse off than I am now.”
“I’m remaindered,” I reminded him.
“But you were once popular,” he said, “so you might be again. Do you know how many characters have high hopes of a permanent place in the readers’ hearts, only to suffer the painful rejection of eternal unreadfulness at the dreary end of Human Drama?”
He was right. A book’s life could be very long indeed, and although the increased leisure time in an unread novel is not to be sniffed at, a need to be vigilant in case someone does read you can keep one effectively tied to a book for life. I usually had an understudy to let me get away, but few were so lucky.
“So,” said Whitby, “how would you like to come out to the smellies tonight? I hear Garden Peas with Mint is showing at the Rex.”
In the BookWorld,