Jasper Fforde

The Well of Lost Plots

Sarah Sammis

The third in the Thursday Next series suffers from the same problems as the first, The Eyre Affair, namely an excessive amount of world building at the expense of plot.

Hoping to protect her memory of her eradicated husband and to convalesce during her pregnancy, Thursday Next seeks refuge inside the world of an unpublished book, accessible via the well of lost plots. So hung up on the possibilities of puns and metathreads, Next is tossed from one contrived situation to another, saving the bulk of the plot for the last fifty pages. Out of 350 pages, it is too long to wait for something to happen.

There were a couple of clever moments earlier on, like the multiple copies of cars Next sees on the street inside of the book version of Swindon and the suggestion that Flatland was the last original plot ever contrived before plots started being recycled.

Overall though, Fforde needs to stop trying to explain every detail of his worlds (fictional and Outlander) and just let his characters live in it. When he actually lets his characters live and go about their lives, he can tell an entertaining story. He needs someone to rein him in on his world building.

Pursued by a sinister multinational corporation and an evil genius with a penchant for clothes shopping and memory modification, literary detective Thursday Next is on the run. Not an ideal situation considering she's pregnant by her husband who is presently suffering a non-existence problem. Taking refuge in the Well of Lost Plots - the place where all Fiction is created - Thursday ponders her next move from inside an unpublished novel of dubious merit entitled Caversham Heights. But in Thursday's world, trouble is only ever a page away, and when a succession of Jurisfiction agents are killed, only one woman is up to the job of unmasking the villain responsible. Will Thursday ever be able to enjoy the quiet life again, or is she about to lose the plot completely?

Sarah Escorsa

① It is a scientifically proven fact that if you love books, literature and words but haven't yet read this series then your life is naught but a slightly huge failure.

② I promised my little nefarious self that I wouldn't share every single glorious, Super Extra Creative (SEC™), hilarious, Most Supremely Witty (MSW™), original idea featured in this book, but I failed miserably, so there. You are, of course, quite welcome and stuff. 

Miss Havisham 😍😍 + St Tabularasa's Generic College for basic character training + the Character Exchange Program + 'Does sarcasm work with other things or is it only fish?' + outlanders vs bookpersons + St Zvlkx™ + Jurisfiction + mass junkfootnoterphones + getting Oedipius off the incest charge + Agatha Christie finishing school + backstories built to order (painful childhood a much sought-after specialty), ReadZip™ + Courrier Bold speech + stolen freeze-dried Plot Devices + Emperor Zhark and his devastatingly destructive death rays + shops that sell dastardly plans for world domination, and fresh ideas for murder, revenge, extortion and other general mayhem (a dream come true that) + dismal failures at verb resource management + has anyone seen Godot, by any chance? + Great Expectations and the little strumpets in it+ Verminators and Verbisoids and Converbilators, oh my + anchovy trifle (don't ask) = Sorry, what? You need a break, you say? Oh, sure. No problem and stuff.



That bad, huh? After only a few miserable lines? You sure don't have the most resilient of dispositions, puny humans.

So. Back on track let's get. 

Holesmiths and bloopholes + unionized nursery rhyme characters (aka pains in the whatsit) + the Text Sea Environment Protection Agency and dangerously low reserves of the letter "U" + punctuation theft and the last chapter of Ulysses + OralTradPlus and ClayTablet V2.1 + the gentle comedy of manners known as Titus Andronicus + Procrastination 1.3 and Writer's Block 2.4 viruses + where the bloody fish is Godot, anyway?! + Wuthering Heights rage counselling sessions + subtext classes + the Council of Genre Plot Adjustment Subcommittee + Ultraword™ and PageGlow™ and SpineTitle™, oh my + small armies of Mrs Danvers + carrots that misspell into parrots + you need another break, you say? Well that's just too bad, isn't it? + the Narrative Continuity Code + serial ad-libbers + the Tom Jones index (not this Tom Jones, in case you were wondering) + Rabbit Grand Central and Eject-O-Hats + the Anti-Misspelling Fast Response Group + “Vonnegut does it all the time” + Miss Havisham getting fed up of pussyfooting around =

 

👋 To be continued and stuff.

· Book 1: The Eyre Affair ★★★★★
· Book 2: Lost in a Good Book ★★★★★
· Book 4: Something Rotten ★★★★★
· Book 5: First Among Sequels ★★★★
· Book 6: One of Our Thursdays is Missing ★★★
· Book 7: The Woman Who Died a Lot ★★★★
· Book 8: Dark Reading Matter -  to be published



[June 2013]

I just read The Well of Lost Plots for the second time and I loved it as much as I did when it first came out. Fforde seems to be having an idea a minute and the book is as wacky as the other instalments and packed with creative ideas. Definitely one of my favourite in the series!



[November 2005]

Thursday Next's wacky adventures in the BookWorld continue, a brilliant book!

Jeni Enjaian

I absolutely loved this book just like the first two in the series. It was a little harder to get into this one but that's because I had to read the actual book rather than listen to the audiobook. (The version I got from the library was corrupted.) The Thursday Next books do not lend themselves well to skimming. There's just so much that you miss. That's why the audiobook version is so great, at least one of the reasons why.

Once I realized this and slowed down, I enjoyed this reading as much as the audiobook version. In fact, I'm pretty sure the section with the myspelling vyrus would not have come across quite as well when read aloud as it did in the printed word.

While I missed Thursday's alternate reality "real" world, I enjoyed the complete Book World setting and all the allusions to major works of literature. (I'm also pleased that I have a passing familiarity with most of the books referenced. These references are a book nerd's heaven.)

I can't wait to start listening to the next (no pun intended) book in the series. I also must repeat my strong recommendation that all bibliophiles read these books. They're fantastic.

The Well of Lost Plots

Reviews