Lost in a Good Book is the sequel to Jasper Fforde's outstanding debut novel, The Eyre Affair. If you don't want to spoil a serious helping of reading pleasure, I recommend you read that book before diving into this one, and even before reading this review.
Like so many sequels, be they literary or cinematic, Lost in a Good Book suffers from follow-up syndrome. No matter how brilliant the writer, it often happens that the author's best ideas go into their first major work, the concept of a sequel being a distant afterthought while writing their first novel. In the case of Fforde, The Eyre Affair was his above-and-beyond work of fiction. Lost in a Good Book on the other hand reads more like a parade of clever ideas in search of a storyline than a tightly plotted narrative dressed in just enough clever twists to keep the reader on their toes. All of the writing skill on display in The Eyre Affair is still right there on the page, but this is definitely more of an "idea book" than a great story. In this, it reminds me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which always struck me as annoyingly trite in its attempts to be clever and avant garde.
Anyway...the plot of Lost in a Good Book again revolves around Thursday Next, our Literatec Agent heroine from The Eyre Affair. Thursday's now happily married to her true love, but bogged down at work with requests for interviews and PR gigs since her rearrangement of the ending of Jane Eyre in the previous book made her the media darling of Special Ops. She's also very much outside the good graces of Goliath Corporation, which wants their erstwhile agent Jack Schitt rescued from Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven, where he's been immured. But the Prose Portal, invented by Thursday's uncle Mycroft, has been destroyed. So Goliath resorts to some very high stakes blackmail to pressure Thursday into finding a way to spring Schitt from his poetic stockade. To add a bit of spice, there are questions as to whether or not Acheron Hades is really as dead as Thursday left him in the final chapters of Jane Eyre. In the process of trying to set things right, Thursday's reality becomes strange indeed, even by the standards of her world.
And this in essence is where my problem with the book begins. The plot in Lost in a Good Book is fairly weak. Or, if not weak, quite lost in all the hubbub. Fforde has a vivid imagination and the scenes he paints are fascinating. But a collection of unorthodox ideas, however clever, doesn't necessarily add up to a satisfying read. At least a few of the scenes in this book felt completely superfluous, contributing nothing whatsoever to the plot - only providing more space for Fforde to flex his creative muscles. It really gets a bit kitchen-sinkish by the end. Perhaps he could have saved some of these ideas and scenes for another book; I certainly wouldn't have missed them in this one.
Another way in which Lost in a Good Book suffers from sequel syndrome is the lack of a neat and tidy ending. It's obvious that Fford wrote this as a transitional book because there are plenty of loose ends to the narrative threads left over at the end of this book. This lack of resolution makes it far more difficult to judge the novel as a stand alone work of fiction. And as transitional works go, you should probably be thinking "Empire Strikes Back" here rather than "The Two Towers."
Fforde's writing is just as witty and darkly funny as previously. I laughed out loud several times when reading this book. If you're well read, it will flatter your literary IQ even more than The Eyre Affair did. The novel is full of nods and winks to those in the know; like the magazine for the "suckers & biters" SpecOps Force - Van Helsing's Gazette. (Ten points to anyone who id's that one. Hint: see my next book review.) But the sly literary references and fun ideas left very little room for things like character development. Thursday Next was reasonably well developed in The Eyre Affair, but someone being introduced to her in Lost in a Good Book probably would miss her charm and see her as little more than a stick figure around which the "plot" revolves.
I'm being very hard on this book, I know. I'm a demanding reader when it comes to fiction, particularly when reading a book by an author whose previous work has greatly impressed me. Lost in a Good Book is not an altogether bad book. It's just that I feel personally let down by it. I can offer a grudging recommendation and even find it within me to give this book a four star rating. But I want you to know just how much I wavered between three and four stars for this book. If I could, I'd give it three and a half stars.
Word on the street is that yet another Thursday Next book is out there, called The Well of Lost Plots and there's apparently more where that came from. I'm certainly willing to give subsequent Thursday Next books a fair shake. But for the moment, I can only give my full endorsement to the original novel in the series.
Curious about other books in this series? You can find my verdicts here:
• The Eyre Affair - the one book by Jasper Fforde you absolutely must read
• The Well of Lost Plots - worth the read, but doesn't hold a candle to The Eyre Affair
Recommended:
