Lost in A Good Book

The publicity surrounding the successful rebookment
of Jane Eyre was fun to begin with but rapidly grew

wearisome.
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book:
I dutifully toured all points of the globe doing

signings, library openings, talks and interviews. The
same questions, the same SpecOps-approved answers.
Supermarket openings, literary dinners, offers of book
deals.
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 2). .p. 2). .
‘I don’t want to bug you or anything,’ she said shyly,

‘but was Edward Rochester really drop-dead gorgeous
to die for?’
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 5). .
She single-handedly defeated Acheron Hades, ended

the Crimean War and boldly hoodwinked the Goliath
Corporation.
‘Seems everyone wants you to investigate their

favourite book,’
in the Crimean peace talks Russia had demanded Kent

as war reparations.
the SpecOps HQ. The building was of a brusque no-

nonsense Germanic design, hastily erected during the
occupation; the façade still bore battle scars from
Swindon’s liberation in 1949.
Where are you!?!’10 [Footnote 10 ‘I’ll explain it all

when we meet. Sorry to have to communicate with
you in footnotes but I’m due in court in ten minutes.
Akrid Snell.
poor Bertha Rochester bothers me a bit.’

I made my way into the high-ceilinged LiteraTec
office, which more closely resembled a library than
anything else. There weren’t many books we didn’t
have – the result of bootleg seizures of literary works
collected over the years.
He was a natural buffer between us at SO-27 and

Commander Braxton Hicks, who was strictly a
company man. Analogy guarded our independence
closely, which was the way we all liked it.
‘What possible benefit could the Toast Marketing

Board get from sponsoring us?’
On every available wall space there hung pictures of

Shakespeare, framed playbills, engravings and
commemorative plates. It was clear she was a serious
fan. Not
‘That fragment was in Will’s hand and covers only two

lines of dialogue between Lear and Cordelia. It sold at
auction for 1.8 million! Just think how much Cardenio
would be worth!’ ‘A genuine Cardenio would be
almost priceless, ma’am,’ said Bowden politely,
emphasising the ‘genuine’ bit.
Victor used to say that Shakespeare forgery was

inherently impossible because the act of copying
overrode the act of inspired creation – the heart being
squeezed out by the mind, so to speak. But as I turned
the first page and read the dramatis personae,
something stirred within me. Butterflies mixed with a
certain apprehension.
Bowden pointed out that the original manuscript of

Marlowe’s Edward II only surfaced in the thirties,

‘The Neanderthal experiment was conceived in order
to create the euphemistically entitled “medical test
vessels”, living creatures that were as close as possible
to humans without actually being human within the
context of the law.
They were subsequently released into the community

as cheap labour and became a celebrated tax write-off.
‘Poppycock!’ she guffawed in a loud and annoying

manner. ‘He’s only a Neanderthal!’
‘We are not animals,’ announced the small and once

extinct strand of human. ‘We want to be a protected
species – like dodo, mammoth – and you. We want to
speak to head man at Goliath and someone from Toad
News.’
‘Nor us,’ returned Kaylieu, ‘but you have a choice. We

don’t. We should never have been brought back. Not
to this. Not to carry bags for Sapien, no childer and
umbrellas jab-jab.’
travelling knight errant, but to the ChronoGuard he

was nothing less than a criminal. He threw in his
badge and went rogue seventeen years ago when his
‘historical and moral’ differences brought him into
conflict with the ChronoGuard High Chamber. The
downside of this was that he didn’t really exist at all in
any accepted terms of the definition; the ChronoGuard
had interrupted his conception in 1917 by a well-timed
knock on his parents’ front door. But despite all this
Dad was still around, and I and my brothers had been
born.
1968

‘A ChronoGuard officer turned up at my wedding bash
wanting to know where you were.’ ‘Lavoisier?’ ‘Yes;
do you know
‘Remember, Thursday, that scientific thought – indeed,

any mode of thought, whether it be religious or
philosophical or anything else – is just like the
fashions that we wear – only much longer lived. It’s a
little like a boy band.’
‘Well, every now and then a boy band comes along.

We like it, buy the records, posters, parade them on
TV, idolise them right up until—’ ‘—the next boy
band?’ I suggested.
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .pp. 53-54). .
‘We found a thirty-third play by Shakespeare.’ ‘Thirty-

three?’ echoed my father. ‘That’s odd. When I took the
entire works back to the actor Shakespeare to
distribute there were only eighteen.’ ‘Until yesterday
there have always been thirty-two.’‘Perhaps the actor
Shakespeare started writing them himself ?’ I
suggested. ‘By thunder, you could be right!’ exclaimed
my father. ‘He looked a bright spark. Tell me, how
many comedies are there now?’ ‘Fifteen,’ I replied.
‘But I only gave him three. They must have been so
popular he started writing new ones himself!’ ‘It
would explain why all the comedies are pretty much
the same,’ I added. ‘Spells, identical twins, shipwrecks
—’ ‘—usurped dukes, men dressed as women,’
continued my father. ‘You could be right.’ ‘But wait a
moment—’
‘Male guilt avoidance syndrome,’ explained my father.

‘It’s a recognised medical condition by 2054.’
‘The Neanderthal experiment was simultaneously the

high and low point of the genetic revolution.
Successful in that a long-dead cousin of Homo sapiens
was brought back from extinction, yet a failure in that
the scientists, so happy to gaze upon their experiments
from their ever lofty ivory towers, had not seen so far
as to consider the social implications that a new
species of man might command in a world unvisited
by their like for over thirty millennia. It was little
surprise that so many of the Neanderthals felt confused
and unprepared for the pressures of modern life. It was
Homo sapiens at his least sapient.’ GERHARD VON
SQUID – Neanderthals – Back after a Short Absence

I often forget which one I’m at, and as you can
imagine, preaching to the Idolatry Friends of St Zvlkx
the Consumer the sermon that I should have been
reading to the Church of the Misrepresented Promise
of Eternal Life can be highly embarrassing.
The mammoth population in England, Wales and

Scotland amounted to 249 individuals in nine groups,
all of whom migrated north to south around late
autumn and back again in the spring.
‘Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of

cancer, Schitt-Hawse.’
Don’t speak to anyone about anything, for Christ’s

sake – do you want to spend the next thousand
readings imprisoned in Castle Doubting or
something?’]
Chesse issue.
‘You haven’t changed, Thursday Next!’ said Sue

angrily. ‘Whenever you’re about something
dangerously other walks with you.
‘How you know our name, Miss Next?’ ‘You turned

up at my wedding party,’ I told him. ‘You said you had
a job for me.’
Half the Thal language is about body movements. It’s

possible to conjugate verbs with facial muscles;
dancing is conversation.
I’ve enough to loop you for twenty years. Fancy that?’

I glared back at him, at a loss to know what to do or
say. Looping was a slang term for Closed Loop
Temporal Field Containment. They popped the
criminal in an eight-minute repetitive time loop for
five, ten, twenty years.
‘We have right to health, freedom and pursuit of

happiness, too.’ ‘Legally speaking you don’t,’ replied
Flanker evenly. ‘Those rights belong only to humans.
If you want equality, speak to Goliath. They sequenced
you. They own you. If you get lucky perhaps you can
be at risk. Beg and we might make you endangered.’
On Time slips
‘Shit!’ I cried, my mind racing as I tried to figure out

who might be responsible. (FORESHADOWING)
‘Landen Parke-Laine’s eradication was the best I’d

seen since Veronica Golightly’s. They plucked him out
and left everything else exactly as it was. Not a crude
hatchet job like Churchill or Victor Borge – we got
those sorted out eventually. What
and if I didn’t hurry up and get married she was going

to have to adopt some grandchildren – or steal some
from outside Tesco’s, whichever was easier. I told her I
would go out and look for one as soon as possible
She had youth and hope on her side, and although she
did not know it yet, she had plenty of what we call the
Other Stuff. She
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 121).

I got mixed up with some oddness in my youth and the
long and short of it is that I can’t shuffle off this mortal
coil until I have read the ten most boring classics.’
PRECIOSA PÁGINA (128)
‘—the Czar’s chief negotiator has accepted the

Foreign Minister’s offer of Tunbridge Wells as war
reparations,’ intoned the anchorman gravely. ‘The
small town and two-thousand-acre environs would
becomebecome a Russian-owned enclave named
Botchkamos Istochnik within England and all citizens
of the new Russian colony would be offered dual
nationality. On the spot for TNN is Lydia Startright.
Lydia, how are things down there?’
‘Since Imperial Russia is the second-wealthiest nation

on the planet,’ replied Lydia, ‘Tunbridge Wells may
find itself, like the island of Fetlar, to be an important
offshore banking institution for Russia’s wealthy
nobility.’
I flicked again to a documentary about the Whig

political party’s links to radical Baconian groups in the
seventies.
‘I’m going to take the Gravitube to Osaka tomorrow

and see if I can track down anyone who knew Mrs
Nakajima – it’s a long shot, but who knows.’
‘By the time this decade is out, we aim to construct a

transport system that can take a man or a woman from
New York to Tokyo and back again in two hours . . .’ –
US President John F. Kennedy
In 1960, a new form of transportation system was

begun – the Gravitube.

‘Jurisfiction has eyes and ears everywhere, Miss
Next.’
‘Jurisfiction is the service we run inside novels to

maintain the integrity of popular fiction. The printed
word might look solid to you, but where I come from
movable type has a much deeper meaning.’ ‘The
ending of Jane Eyre,’ I murmured, suddenly realising
what all the fuss was about. ‘I changed it, didn’t I?’
Overmantle
defend Tess for the umpteenth time. As Hardy

originally wrote it she gets off. Listen, try and figure
some extenuating circumstances as to your actions.
O. NAKAJIMA – Adventures in the Book Trade
There was a billion-pound hole in the budget for their

advanced weapons division and a Prose Portal, any
Prose Portal, would be just the thing to fill it.
But something was happening. Something new,

something other.
soften the barriers that had hardened since the day I

first entered Jane Eyre in 1958.
I stepped closer and rested my fingertips lightly on the

pristine volumes. They felt warm to the touch, so I
leaned closer and pressed my ear to the spines.
me. They weren’t just collections of words arranged

neatly on a page to give the impression of reality –
each of these volumes was reality. The similarity of
these books to the copies I had read back home was no
more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject
– these books were alive !
(BIBLIOTECA BORGES)
But in the middle of that floor was another circular
void through which I could see another floor, and
another and another and so on to the depths of the
library. I looked up. It was the same above me, more
circular light wells and the spiral staircase reaching up
into the dizzy heights above.
‘I . . . I . . . didn’t know I could do this.’ ‘What you

mean is that you did know that you couldn’t – it’s
quite a different thing. The
PAGINA 169 INTERTEXTUALIDAD
She looked about her, checked the door was closed and
then opened a bureau which I could see was full, not
of the trappings of her wretched life, but of small
luxuries that must, I presumed, make her existence
here that much more bearable. Amongst other things I
saw a Sony Walkman, a stack of National
Geographics, a few Daphne Farquitt novels, and one
of those bats that has a rubber ball attached to a piece
of elastic.
Ignore the onlookers – they are simply here as a

narrative device to heighten paranoia and have no
bearing on your case. We will deny all charges.’
Havisham grasped them with a gleam in her eye and

jumped into the driver’s seat. ‘Is it the four-cam
engine?’ she asked excitedly. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘standard
1.6 unit.’

J.’ The doors opened to reveal a mass of book fans,
fighting in a most unseemly fashion over what even I
had to admit were some very good bargains. I had
heard about these sorts of ‘fiction-frenzies’ before –
but never witnessed
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 193). Hodder

& Stoughton. Edición de Kindle
How did you think you were going to handle the

otherness at Jurisfiction if you can’t handle a few
crazed fiction-fanciers hell-bent on finding bargains?
I took a deep breath and waded into the swirling

maelstrom of popular prose-induced violence.
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 196). .\
‘In 1983 the youthful Yorrick Kaine was elected leader

of the Whigs, at that time a small and largely
inconsequential party whose desire to put the
aristocracy back in power and limit voting rights to
homeowners had placed it on the outer edges of the
political arena. A pro-crimean stance coupled with a
wish for British unification helped build nationalist
support, and by 1985 the Whigs had three MPs in
Parliament. They built their manifesto on populist
tactics such as reducing the cheese duty and offering
dukedoms as prizes on the National Lottery. A shrewd
politician and clever tactician, Kaine was ambitious
for power – in whatever way he could get it.’
A. J. P. MILLINER – The New Whigs – From Humble
Beginnings to Fourth Reich
It seems there is something very like SpecOps 27

inside books – I’ve yet to figure it all out. How have
things been out here?’
It was as it yorric kaine had never suggested the

invasion of Wales two years earlier or the reduction of
the right to vote the year before;
Mr Duchamp2924.’
‘We’d present it as fiction, Miss Next,’ explained Flex.

‘We’ve even got a title: The Eyre Affair. What do you
think?’
the bond between a painting and an owner should not

be sullied by anything as obscenely sapien as cash.
*yorick* politically dead no-hoper he was polling

ahead of the ruling Teafurst party.

'
‘A lackey for the Goliath Corporation, Lavoisier?’ said
my father. ‘You disappoint me.’
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 229). Hodder

& Stoughton. Edición de Kindle.
the ChronoGuard can’t function without corporate

sponsorship.’
Moving underground with the English resistance and

various stalwart regiments of the Local Defence
Volunteers,
postwar republican England he was made non-

executive President for life, a post he held until his
assassination.’
‘PageRunner: Name given to any character who is out

of his or her book and moves through the back-story
(or more rarely the plot) of another book. They may be
lost, vacationing, part of the Character Exchange
Programme or criminals, intent on mischief. (See:
Bowdlerisers.)

‘It means nothing, Miss Next. Mellors had a wife and
family in Slough for two decades and Heathcliff
worked in Hollywood for three years under the name
of Buck Stallion – no one suspected a thing in either
case.’
‘You are!’ yelled Volescamper, pointing – correctly –

at me. Kaine, revealing his fictional roots by his
inability to follow undedicated dialogue, pointed his
finger – at Tweed.
night. The officers would all be awarded the SpecOps

Star for ‘Conspicuous bravery in the face of Other’.
‘Character Exchange Programme: If a character from

one book looks suspiciously like another from the
same author, chances are they are. There is a certain
degree of economy that runs through the book world
and personages from one book are often asked to stand
in for others.
I suspected that convincing SO-1 of Lavoisier’s

chronuption might take a lot more.
‘You mustn’t be so linear,’ said my father. ‘Although I

try to visit only in your chronological order,
sometimes it’s not possible.’
‘Very different. You won’t be in SO-27. In fact, there

won’t be any SpecOps at all. The Second World War
will finish in 1945 and the Crimean conflict won’t last
much beyond 1854.’
Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 367).
‘There’s more. It’s your decision and you have to

know precisely what is involved. Everything will be
gone. All the work you’ve ever done, all the work you
will do. There will be no dodos or Neanderthals, no
Willspeak machines, no Gravitube—’
‘Will there be Jane Eyre ?’ ‘Yes,’ sighed my father.

‘Yes, there will always be Jane Eyre.’

Lost in A Good Book

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Lost in A Good Book

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The publicity surrounding the successful rebookment

of Jane Eyre was fun to begin with but rapidly grew

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book:

I dutifully toured all points of the globe doing

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 2). .p. 2). .

‘I don’t want to bug you or anything,’ she said shyly,

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 5). .

She single-handedly defeated Acheron Hades, ended

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 10). .

‘Seems everyone wants you to investigate their

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 18). .

in the Crimean peace talks Russia had demanded Kent

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 19). .

the SpecOps HQ. The building was of a brusque no-

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 19). .

Where are you!?!’10 [Footnote 10 ‘I’ll explain it all

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 24). .

poor Bertha Rochester bothers me a bit.’

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 25). .

He was a natural buffer between us at SO-27 and

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 26). .

‘What possible benefit could the Toast Marketing

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 26). .

On every available wall space there hung pictures of

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 30). .

‘That fragment was in Will’s hand and covers only two

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 30). .

Victor used to say that Shakespeare forgery was

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 36). .

Bowden pointed out that the original manuscript of

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 37). .

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 41). .

They were subsequently released into the community

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 41). .

‘Poppycock!’ she guffawed in a loud and annoying

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 42). .

‘We are not animals,’ announced the small and once

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 44). .

‘Nor us,’ returned Kaylieu, ‘but you have a choice. We

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 47). .

travelling knight errant, but to the ChronoGuard he

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 52). .

‘Remember, Thursday, that scientific thought – indeed,

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 53). .

‘Well, every now and then a boy band comes along.

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .pp. 53-54). .

‘We found a thirty-third play by Shakespeare.’ ‘Thirty-

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 53). .

‘Male guilt avoidance syndrome,’ explained my father.

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 56). .

‘The Neanderthal experiment was simultaneously the

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 59). .

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 71). .

The mammoth population in England, Wales and

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 85). .

‘Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 86). .

Don’t speak to anyone about anything, for Christ’s

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 89). .

‘You haven’t changed, Thursday Next!’ said Sue

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 92). .

‘How you know our name, Miss Next?’ ‘You turned

Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book: .p. 98). .

yorick politically dead no-hoper he was polling