One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [14]
“Very good, Mizzen Exe.”
“Here,” I said to Carmine, handing her the complete script for my part. “I have to go out for an hour. I’ll test you on it when I get back.”
She suddenly looked nervous. “What if someone starts to read us while you’re away?”
“They won’t,” I replied, “and if they do, Mrs. Malaprop will point you in the right dictation. Just take it smooth and easy. The rest of the cast will help you along.”
“What do I do with Skimmers?” she asked with a faint tinge of panic in her voice. All rookies feared Dippers, Skimmers and Last-Chapter-Firsters.
“There’s no hard-and-fast rule. Skimmers move in a generally forward direction, and with experience you’ll figure out where they’re going to land next. But the main thing is not to waste time with the nuisance reader—in a word, prioritize. Find the stable, methodical, bread-and-butter readers and give them your best. Leave the Skimmers and Dippers high and dry if there’s a crisis. When things die down later, you can pick them up then.”
“And students?”
“A breeze. They’ll pause at the end of each sentence to think quasi-intellectual deep thoughts, so as soon as a full stop looms, you can be off dealing with someone else. When you get back, they’ll still be pondering about intertextuality, inferred narratives and the scandalously high price of the subsidized beer in the student union.”
She was quiet and attentive, so I carried on.
“You should show no discrimination with readers. Treat the lip movers as you would the New York Times critic. You might not be able to distinguish between the two at first, but you soon will. Yossarian said that you can get to know individual readers by the way they read you. Mind you, he’s been doing it a long time, and Catch-22 gets reread a lot.”
“You’ve met Yossarian?”
“He was just leaving the room after giving a talk. I saw his foot.”
“Left or right?”
“Left.”
“I met someone who was beaten about the head boy Sir John Falstaff,” remarked Mrs. Malaprop in an attempt to show that she, too, hobnobbed with celebrities.
“I talked to someone who held Pollyanna’s hat for three whole pages,” added Carmine.
“Small fry,” remarked Pickwick, eager to outdo us all. “Sam Spade himself actually spoke to me.”
There was silence. This was impressive.
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Get that stupid bird out of my way.’”
“Well, pretend to be a soldier and elope with my ward,” remarked Mrs. Malaprop, her word choice rendered clean and clear by the sarcasm. “You can dine out on that one for years.”
“It’s better than your dumb Falstaff story.”
“The thing to remember,” I remarked, to stop the argument before it got to the next few stages, which were insults, crockery throwing and punches, “is that the more readers there are, the easier it becomes. If you relax, it actually becomes a great deal of fun. The words spring naturally to your lips, and you can concentrate on not just giving the best possible performance but also dealing with any readers who are having problems—or indeed any readers who are trying to cause trouble for you and change the book. You’ll be surprised by how strong the power of reader suggestion can get, and if you let readers get the upper hand, it’ll be Smilla’s Sense of Snow all over again.”
Carmine looked thoughtful. The Sea Worms incident was a sobering lesson for everyone, and something that no one wanted to repeat.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said, preparing to leave. “I have to meet with Commander Herring. Mrs. Malaprop, will you show Carmine around the series and do the introductions? Start with the Gravitube and the Diatryma. After that it’s all fairly benign.”
4.
The Red-Haired Gentleman
Despite the remaking of the BookWorld, some books remained tantalizingly out of reach. The entire Sherlock Holmes canon was the most obvious example. It was entirely possible that they didn’t know there was a BookWorld and still thought they were real. A fantastic notion, until you consider that up until 11:06 A.M. of April 12, 1948, everyone else had thought the same. Old-timers still speak of “the Great