The Next Next

In the fifth novel of Jasper Fforde's series starring Thursday Next, his heroine is a mother of two (or is it three?), and when she isn't tending the kids, she's working for Acme Carpets, Swindon's premier purveyor of floor coverings. If that doesn't sound like the intrepid investigator of literary crimes from The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, and The Well of Lost Plots, well, much has happened in the three years since the publication of her last adventure, Something Rotten. In First Among Sequels (Viking, $24.95), 14 years have passed in Thursday's life, during which time her son Friday has grown into an uncommunicative, layabed teen and the Swindon Police Department has disbanded its Special Operations Network, forcing Thursday and her SpecOps colleagues to track down book crooks, errant clones, and rogue demons behind the front of a carpeting concern. And we meet not only an older, more maternal Thursday but a grittier, more violent Thursday and a softer, more holistic Thursday. The latter pair are versions of the heroine as she appears in novels published in Thursday's world, which means that when the "real" Thursday leaps into Bookworld, where all literary characters live, she can meet her fictional selves. That's the kind of mind-twisting delight that Fforde threads through all of the wonderfully absurd, exuberantly literary books of his Thursday Next and Nursery Crime series -- and that's made the onetime camera crewman into a very successful author. With Fforde returning to Austin on the promotional tour for First Among Sequels -- he'll appear at Barnes & Noble Arboretum on Friday, Aug. 3, 7:30pm -- he spoke to the Chronicle about the new book and the work of writing.

Austin Chronicle: You're about to launch the book tour for your first Thursday Next novel in three years. Are people anticipating the return of Thursday?

Jasper Fforde: It does seem that way. There's a lot of excitement that's been generated by it. I'm trying to tell myself that this is not because people didn't like the Nursery Crime series, only that people like Thursday a lot more and really want to know what happens next ... or what happens to Next. So it's kind of nice. It's fun to be back, actually, in a funny sort of way.

AC: How did the decision to jump 14 years in Thursday's life come about?

JF: When you're writing a book, what you do -- well, what I do, anyway, is I think of this thing, this gadget, that I want to use, so Friday, the grunty teenager -- and you know, teenagers can be very, very dull and grunty and not talk a great deal -- I wanted him to be able to save the world by not doing anything, by actually sleeping in in the mornings, by total inaction. And once you get that sort of concept in your mind, you go, "How the hell am I going to make it work?" Then it's a question of morphing all the available facts to fit with this notion. And, of course, to be a teenager, he had to be a teenager. So we were 14 years into the future.

AC: Was it too good an idea not to wait until Thursday VI or Thursday VII?

JF: I don't know really. I just saw it that way, and I thought, "To hell with it. That's what I'll do." But I think it's kind of fun. And it makes Thursday 52 years old and slightly more jaded about what's going on, so I thought that was quite amusing as well.

AC: It's interesting to see the new family dynamic that this creates. One thing I really enjoyed about the Jack Spratt series was the family setting. It was such a departure from what you had developed with Thursday. And now she has this family with all these kids. Did you feel any relationship between the family set-up that you developed in the Nursery Crime books and the one in the new Thursday book?

JF: Yeah, I think so. I think it was something that was missing from the early Thursday books. Of course, as an author, you're always looking for different plot devices and different characters to introduce to be able to do various things, and it was something that seemed entirely natural to do with Thursday. But, of course, very young children aren't terribly interesting. They start to get interesting around 12 or 14. I have two 18-year-old daughters, and they're really interesting. So when you have a family dynamic, you have to really do a fast-forward and get to the interesting bit with children. 'Cause there aren't that many interesting plot devices you can do with 6-year-olds. Well, maybe there are, but I couldn't think of any. Semi-grown-up teenage children are much, much more interesting.

AC: You've managed to have your cake and eat it, because you have Thursday as she is in the real world and your Bookworld Thursdays who also show up. Did you have an idea at some point that you wanted to make fun of your own work?

JF: Again, you start thinking of ideas, and you think, "What if, in Thursday's world, somebody started writing books about her? And what if they really weren't very good?" Thursday basically sold the rights to finance the secret SpecOps division at Acme Carpets. So she did it for a very good reason, but as soon as she sold it she realized that it was actually really bad. Now, everybody thinks she's a violent woman who sleeps around a lot, because that's how she's depicted in the books. So once you start with that kind of concept, then you think, "Well, we ought to meet this rather violent Thursday, who just thinks about guns and dresses in black leather." But then I started thinking, "What if there was a book in the series that had a different Thursday, a Thursday that they wanted to be a bit nicer, and she's really drippy?" Then you have this dynamic of three Thursdays, where they're all Thursday but different versions of her, and there's the fun you can have with that.

AC: Did you feel that you were teasing yourself in the way you've done with other authors and their creations? Or did it feel more like an element of the plot that was just a really fun idea to run with?

JF: I think it was probably more that. The bottom line is that anything is fair game as long as it's interesting and amusing. The Thursday books is a very, very broad canvas, and the possibilities are endless. I like the idea that Thursday is a character in a book, and yet she is also a character in a book in her own world. So there's this rather odd feedback loop, where she's not real, but she is real in her world but not real as well, and she meets the person who isn't real. There's this rather ludicrous setup, where there are worlds inside worlds inside worlds, where people are not only real but fictional but fictional again. So she's almost doubly fictional, 'cause the fictional Thursday in Thursday's world is twice fictional, whereas the real Thursday in her world is only once fictional.

These are the sorts of onion layers I like to play with, and I don't think there's any particular gag there that you can put your finger on, but I find it vaguely amusing that I take these ideas and run with them in this very, very absurd fashion. And I think the idea is sound and kind of a good idea. It has a little sort of charm about it, a little bit of warmth that really nice, fun ideas have without being laugh-out-loud belly laughs.

AC: It's a bit like staring into a mirror when there's a mirror behind you, seeing that infinitely receding series of reflections. And that's heaped on top of the time paradoxes that you seem to have great fun teasing us with. I don't know how you can work all those out without your head exploding.

JF: It's difficult. I got a bit fed up with the time-travel stuff actually. I started it with very good intentions. There is a grammar within time-travel stories -- you know, you can't go back and kill your own grandfather 'cause you won't exist -- and my way of playing with it was saying, yes, you can. You can have a father who doesn't exist, yet you still are around and no one can really explain it. And that is the true nature of time travel: It throws up all these impossible paradoxes that no one can explain. And no one really tries to. But I got so tied up in knots in the whole time-travel thing that I decided that in this book I was going to put it 100% to bed.

[In the book,] there is a serious problem with time travel. They're using the technology of it now in the safe bet that it's developed in the future. But they come to the end of time, and [time travel] hasn't been invented, so it's all going to rapidly unravel. I kind of like that idea, and you'll find out at the end of the book how that hooks in together with everything else, but it was really me getting rid of the whole time-travel thing because it does your head in. It's a bit like opening up your head and putting in a food mixer and then whirring your brains around a bit and then closing your head again.

AC: You've said in interviews that you basically cram five books into one. This constant jumping among plot threads and trying to figure out how they're going to come together is one of the many pleasures I find in your works. How hard is it coming up with those separate ideas and then getting them all to meet up at the end of the book?

JF: It's what I call narrative gymnastics. Narrative contortions. I can think up wacky ideas, and that's fine, but the wacky idea has to go somewhere; it can't be on its own as a little island, 'cause then it's an exercise in empty cleverness. It's just pointless showing off. The idea is to take the disparate strands and somehow make them all fit together at the end. The Austen Rover, this transfictional tour bus that the Goliath Corporation is hoping to travel into fiction with, is a lovely idea on its own, but it has to somehow fit into the plot later on. That has to somehow relate to time travel that has to somehow relate to Thursday's problems in Bookworld. It's just a question of finding some kind of link between them, which really isn't too hard, because you can stretch ideas here and there. They're very elastic, and you stretch them a bit like you stretch a drum, I suppose; you pull it in all directions until it all fits together. And it generally does, I find.

AC: Is it as much fun for you as it was in the days before you were published?

JF: I think it is. I mean, I've been doing a book a year for seven years. This is my seventh book in seven years, and that's fairly hard work. I don't really have that much time for anything else. I can still do it, it's not tremendously difficult to do, but part of me wants a little bit longer, perhaps two years, to write a book, 'cause I feel like I could perhaps make it 25 to 30 percent better. Once I've written a book and it's done, when I read it again or think about it or I'm explaining about the ideas at a talk, I'll think, "Oh god, if only I'd done so-and-so." I must say, it is fun, but I would like a little bit more spare time.

I thought being an author would be a tremendously easy life, and I could just get up in the morning and have a cup of coffee and a croissant and then about 11 o'clock write a couple of words and then go out gliding and then come back and do another couple of words at five and then go out and have dinner with my huge contingent of friends. But no, it doesn't work that way. I get up, 8 o'clock, start writing, finish at nine -- nine in the evening -- and have to do that for four months to be able to knock a book out. So it's very hard work, but very enjoyable.

AC: Has the success of the series added to any sense that you have to top yourself? Now that you have these fans, you have to give them more than you gave them in the last book?

JF: You always have to deliver. That's very important. I think there is a sort of unspoken contract between an author and a reader. Readers give me their hard-earned cash, and I entertain them, and that's the deal. So I do feel very strongly that I have to come up with something that is amusing and exciting and different and sort of wrong-foots [the readers] in a nice way each time. And that adds to the pressure, I must say. But in general I like a challenge, and it gets me thinking about new ideas.

Of course, people second-guess me now. Because they know the way I write, they can think, "I wonder where he's going with this. He's probably going to X." And because I know that, I won't go to X; I'll go to Y instead. I haven't used it yet, but I want to use a character called Red Herring. If I'd used a character called Red Herring in the first book, it would've been a red herring. But now, it wouldn't, because people would think, "Ah, that's a red herring. But this is Jasper, and it's unexpected, so it wouldn't be a red herring. Unless he's trying to double-second-guess us, in which case it is a red herring." So if I had a character named Red Herring now, you'd never, ever know whether it really was a red herring or wasn't. I'm trying to take people off in one direction and then suddenly there's this little U-turn, and you're off in another direction. As long as people can't see it coming -- although obviously there are little hints of where it's going to, then you realize and go, "Of course, I should have seen that" -- that's the kind of nice wrong-footing that you want to do as an author.

Bad wrong-footing is when you introduce the murderer three pages from the end. That's anathema to me. You want to have just enough information there so people go, "Aw, gosh, I should have realized. That's so obvious. It was staring me in the face, and if only I'd been a tiny bit smarter, I would've got it." That's great, because it's really rewarding readers.

AC: Well, I have continued to be surprised if not on every page then in every chapter, to find something that is taking me in an unexpected direction. And I'm very much delighted with the book, as I am with the texture of Thursday's world and Bookworld. Like the head of Goliath having his identity confirmed not by a retinal scan but a scan of the knot of his tie. And the scene with Thursday buying black-market cheese from the Welsh Cheese Mafia, which I had to read aloud to my wife as we were riding in the car. One thing I've enjoyed about your books all along is that I read things that are so amusing that I have to share them with someone immediately. I can't just hand them the book, I have to read the damn thing out loud. Do you amuse yourself in that way as you're writing? Do you come up with a bit and feel like, "Oh, that's so good"?

JF: There's usually one gag when I start giggling. I'm trying to remember what it was in First Among Sequels. It was just a gag that I found really amusing. But it was probably something really pathetic.

AC: I thought the dialogue by the Bookworld engineer Isambard Buñuel [who says things like, "I trust you are wellhealthy" and "My memory is so stringbagness these days"] must have been great fun to write.

JF: Yeah, it was, and it's one of those things you do right in the last five minutes before you give it to the publishers. You know, a lot of writing is entirely intuitive. You look at dialogue or a character and go, "This character is not alive. This character is flat and dead, and something's wrong." And you have to add something to it or take it away or whatever. I suddenly thought, "This guy is so bizarre, he just makes up words, because he's such a genius and he's this surreal sort of character." And that's what I did. I just made up all of these bizarre words that he speaks in, and all of a sudden this character came alive. And that was in the last 10 minutes before submission. But often that's what happens. Sometimes it's just a comma or a hyphen or a tiny little reference that puts the world into color. Like tie-knot identification; it's such a silly idea, yet for Goliath it makes total sense. It's very much about people wearing suits, and everyone has their own tie, so it's an individual thing, and let's have it scanned. And you can see it, can't you? Where the little red line goes "nyeet, nyeet" up and down and goes: [deep voice] "Tie knot identification: Passed." It just adds to the color of the world, and it's so subtle. It's such a quiet dark art to make books come alive in this way. It's all in the detail, you know, the icing.

AC: It's great being reacquainted with the characters from the first four books. But when Millon DeFloss, Thursday's personal stalker, reappeared, it occurred to me that you've probably had a bit of experience with stalkers yourself lately. Are all of yours as nice and friendly as Millon is?

JF: Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, I always make a point of appointing a stalker every year, so I know who my stalker is. And they have a little badge that says they're my official stalker, and we give them a T-shirt and a little letter saying what they can and cannot do. It's an in-joke among people who do a lot of work promoting Thursday and my books and everything, who run things like the Fforde Fiesta, which is a biennial festival in Swindon. These are people who are very involved in the Nextian universe. I think we're into our fifth stalker now. It's considered a mild honor within the Nextian fraternity if you have been given the accolade of stalker for a year. So I do know my stalkers. But actually I haven't got any real ones. Everyone's totally polite in the book world, I must say. It's not like being a movie star.

AC: Speaking of movies, do you miss the movie business?

JF: I miss the people in it, I must say. A lot of very eccentric, silly, strange, driven, intelligent, witty people who get together and make movies. It's a tremendous social life working. The thing about movies is that you don't have a social life, so you have your social life at work, and it's really good fun for that. I don't miss standing in a field somewhere in the pouring rain, with the director going, "Just one more time," and you say, "Well, what are going to do different?" and he goes, "I don't know. Just do it again." I don't miss that, but I miss all the funny old people going on location doing silly things. And it was very exciting working on a film set when you've got a big show on or a big scene or a big explosion. But I'm happier doing what I'm doing now, I must say.

AC: I saw you refer to book tours one time as "procrastination without guilt," which is probably the most positive assessment book tours I've ever read. Is it fun for you to go on the road?

JF: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really good. Because all these people come to see me. And I can talk about me. My books. It's a huge ego trip, to be honest, and any author who says "I don't want to go and talk to anyone" is being very mean really with the readers, who basically pay our wages, let's face it. I find it hugely enjoyable. I mean, what's not to enjoy? Talking to people who really enjoy my books and ask me questions about how I write them and me talking about it and stuff like that. You get to meet the booksellers as well, a lot of them who are hand-selling these books to readers, saying, "Hey, have you had a Jasper Fforde yet? Try this book. It's fantastic." That's what these guys in Barnes & Noble and the independents and everything do. My books are very difficult to categorize and sell through the usual channels, like "the English John Grisham" or "the next Stephen King." Those are easy to sell; people know what they're getting. With my books, it's a very strange mix, and it takes those booksellers to say, "Hey, you'd like this book. It's just up your street. You've got a silly sense of humor." So meeting all the booksellers is great; it allows me to say thank you and how I appreciate the work that they've done for me. I find it very enjoyable to go on tour. It gets me out of the house as well and, as I say, it's guilt-free procrastination.