Tuesday 10th July - I think!
The reason for the 'I think' is because I've been on night shifts again! I'm recovered, that is I've slept and eaten and am pretty back to normal, except I can't remember what day of the week it is!
I've been so busy over the last few days. I've sold a lot out of my Ebay store, so it's get that all packed up, and rush it off to the Post Office - quick, because there's another strike on Thursday and Friday. Not that I wouldn't be rushing off to the PO anyway, I like to get things off and gone asap. It's like a sort of an internal itch, I just don't feel comfortable when I know there's people waiting for stuff and I've got to get it to them. It really bugs me.
And the latest Thursday Next novel arrived - oh, let me see, Friday I think. It's called the Mother of All Sequels, and I'm sorry to say it doesn't really live up to the Eyre Affair, or the Well of Lost Plots. But even though it doesn't reach these ecstatic heights, it's pretty damn good, better than much else around. Although - and this is really odd, I actually found The Fourth Bear was a better read. And that's odd, because I wasn't so keen on the Big Over Easy. I think it's because at that point I was desperate to read more of the Thursday Next sequence, so being forced off them, because at that point there were no more Thursday Next novels to read until this one was published, I kind of - well, I didn't invest in it as much as I should have. When I re-read it later, yep I was right there with the crazed inventiveness of this man (Jasper Fforde) and I have really enjoyed The Fourth Bear. But Mother of All Sequels is missing something, and I know exactly what it is for me, personally speaking. It's set in way too normal a world. There's only two tiny little pieces about Pickwick, the now bald dodo, when the knitting of her new teacosy style jumperette (she's lost her feathers poor dear) could have been a constant source of fun. But most of all, there's no stunning new piece of technology. In all of the past novels, there's been a source of wonder. The gravitubes, the airships, the bookworld awards, the Pro-Caths, (yes, I know this means absolutely nothing to you if you've not read these books!) Pagerunners and Evacuation Hats - all of that seems to be missing. They get their mention of course, but that's all it is, a fleeting mention. There's masses of stuff about the Imaginotransference engines (this is the mechanism by which the contents of a book are moved into a person's mind) but an engine's an engine, and frankly, not really my bag. On top of this, the character of Friday didn't grab me either, and the pain, the intense sorrow for Thursday and the mindworm planted into her by Aornis is just too terrible. It almost turns a brilliantly light comedy sequence into tragedy, it's a darkening of the story that is the more awful because it's unresolved. Presumably it's intended to be resolved in the next book, and it does look like there will be a next book at the end, because the whole thing is oddly unresolved, but personally I feel like he almost had trouble writing this one. The Fourth Bear flies off the page, trips over itself in it's joy and delight, but this - I don't know. It doesn't shamble, it's sprightly enough, but there's something missing from this that's there in the first four books.
Which leaves you asking if you're a writer, should you force yourself to continue with something if the spontaneity of it has gone for a while? I reckon he should have given himself another year, maybe two or three before writing this. It's got a forced-ness about it that speaks more of publisher's deadlines and contracts than anything else, and I'd really rather wait for the very best to come, than suffer a lurch in appreciation. Do you know what I mean? Maybe I'm just being fussy, and maybe most of all what this is really about is that I was looking forward to it so much, that the book had an almost impossible task to perform - to live up to my expectations. Because I hadn't got so involved in the Jack Spratt series, it delighted me because I was surprised. With the Mother of All Sequels, I was constantly waiting for the laugh out loud moment, and it never came. Expectation can be a deadly thing. It's like the next album of a favourite band that you end up never playing after the first time you listen to it, you'd just rather listen to the old favourite again. The fact you have to go out and buy another copy of whatever your favourite film is, rather than watch the latest version at the flicks. Expectation is awful, because it lets you down. We're rather odd creatures at times, aren't we?
