First Among Sequels [Special Limited Edition] [Hardcover]

"First Among Sequels" is brilliant. I may as well mention that first.

It's a chaotic book. Other reviewers have said that the lack of a main 'villain' is disappointing, I think the opposite- Fforde juggles various plots at the same time and the result is a sort-of murder mystery where any one of several different characters, in different worlds, could be the key. Among the various plot threads are some ideas of pure genius- for example the time-travelling authority the ChronoGuard who have been happily travelling through time on the assumption that time travel would eventually be invented in order to allow them to do it, but who have now reached 23 minutes before the end of the universe only to find that time travel hasn't been invented after all so they're not sure what they're going to do about it. Fforde refers back to ideas from each of the first four books and brings new things in at the same time. These books are heading toward bursting point.

With the ongoing Thursday Next series I'd say that you should definitely start at the beginning ("The Eyre Affair"), partly because you might find "First Among Sequels" very confusing otherwise, but also because reading this book will spoil your reading of the previous books, as , unlike something like the Discworld series, you'll know who's survived and who hasn't.

The fact Fforde is now five books into the series allows him to become introspective, and weave his own books and fictional versions of his own fictional characters (fictional squared?) into the narrative. When I first read that I was worried that this book would be in danger of heading, um, up it's own bottom. Thankfully it manages to avoid that and Fforde weaves "First Among Sequels" into the original "The Eyre Affair" in a way that enriches things rather than messing them up. I was reminded of "Back To The Future II", which in my eyes is a good thing.

If you haven't read any Japser Fforde before, go and buy the Eyre Affair, and work through the series. If you have read the earlier Thursday Next novels and are wondering whether to buy this one, it really is a no-brainer. All the usual Fforde touches are present, intricate plot, laugh out loud one liners, underlying erudition, engaging characters. One may worry that five novels in, Fforde could get tired or formulaic, but to my mind, he avoids both such traps admirably. My one gripe is that the political satire is a touch heavy handed, but that is a minor concern. Definitely recommended.

"Boy, was this book ever crap." - In FIRST AMONG SEQUELS, Thursday Next's judgment upon the first book in the series, THE EYRE AFFAIR

The Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde must rank as one of the greatest flights of imagination in the annals of fiction. For the bibliophile, the imagery contained in the narratives is mind-boggling and addictive.

Next lives in the English town of Swindon. In the first four volumes of the series (The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots (Thursday Next Novels (Penguin Books)), and Something Rotten), it's the mid-1980s. In FIRST AMONG SEQUELS, it's 2002. But Fforde's United Kingdom isn't the one we know; mammoth herds roam the island, cloned Neanderthals comprise a subclass, Thursday has a pet dodo bird, and long distance travel is by Gravitube.

But the author's most ambitious imaginative construct is Bookworld. Existing in an alternate universe, it's where books exist as physical entities, where the plots - and, most importantly in the Next series, the fictional plots - exist as something akin to stage sets on which the literary characters are actors that play their roles when the book is read by someone in Outland, i.e. Thursday's "real" world. You can get a sense of the place from a description of Hanger Eight in Bookworld's Book Maintenance Facility:

"... there was room on the hanger floor for not only Darcy's country home of Pemberly but also Rosings, Netherfield and Longbourn as well. They had all been hoisted from (Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics)) by a massive overhead crane so the empty husk of the novel could be checked for fatigue cracks before being fumigated for nesting grammasites and then repainted. At the same time, an army of technicians, plasterers, painters, carpenters and so forth were crawling over the houses, locations, props, furnishings and costumes, all of which had been removed for checking and maintenance."

Next has the capability, unique among Outlanders, to travel between her world and Bookworld. As such, she's the super-agent of Jurisfiction, Bookworld's enforcement agency tasked with keeping order within the fiction genre. Disorder includes such things as book characters attempting to escape to Outland, the inexplicable seepage of humor from comedic novels, improvised and unauthorized dialogue by mischievous character understudies, outbreaks of the MAWk-I5H virus in works by Dickens, the buildup of irony on dialogue injectors, malicious narrative corruption, and plot disruptions caused by a shortage of the pianos used as props.

Thursday also smuggles Welsh cheese; an underground cheese market rose in response to the England's hated Cheese Duty which levies taxes ranging from 1300 to 1500 percent on the smelly foodstuff. Personally, I'd like to see Machynlleth Wedi Marw, a "really strong cheese", stocked in the local Tesco.

"It'll bring you up in a rash just by looking at it. Denser than enriched plutonium, two grams can season enough macaroni and cheese for eight hundred men. The smell alone will corrode iron. A concentration in air of only seventeen parts per million will bring on nausea and unconsciousness within twenty seconds ... Open only out of doors, and even then only with a doctor's certificate and well away from populated areas."

FIRST AMONG SEQUELS is the best yet of the Next series. It compels me to suspect that the author is on some mind-expanding substance; it's that inspired. A brilliant plot development is Thursday's encounter with Thursday 1-4 and Thursday 5, the former being the lead character in the first four installments of the series (described as being "the violent ones, full of death and gratuitous sex"), and the latter the timid and yogurt-loving Next of THE GREAT SAMUEL PEPYS FIASCO. (Am I confusing you? Never mind; it makes perfect sense within the pages, just as will the part played by the recipe for unscrambled scrambled eggs in the prevention of the End of Time as we know it.)

I've always considered myself a linear-thinking, down-to-earth kind of guy. But the tremendous appeal of the Thursday Next series to my reader's appreciation has challenged that self-assessment. If you're a book-lover like me determined to read until the last gasp, do yourself the great favor of devouring FIRST AMONG SEQUELS, and indeed the entire series if you haven't yet done so. Lose yourself in a good book.