Jasper Fforde
The Well of Lost Plots
(Thursday Next #3)
For Mari Who makes the torches burn brighter
A wise man wants for only nourishing cabbage soup; seek not other things. Except perhaps a toaster.
Acknowledgements
Extract from Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (copyright Evelyn Waugh 1945) by permission of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop on behalf of the Evelyn Waugh Trust and the Estate of Laura Waugh.
Reference to the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (copyright The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty) by kind permission of A. P. Watt Ltd.
References to Shadow the Sheepdog by Enid Blyton by kind permission of Enid Blyton Limited and with thanks to Chorion pic.
Frederick Warne & Co. is the owner of all rights, copyrights and trademarks in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations.
Extract from Tiger Tiger (copyright Alfred Bester 1955) by kind permission of the Estate of Alfred Bester and The Sayle Literary Agency.
This book has been bundled with Special Features including: the 'making of' wordamentary, deleted scenes from all three books, out-takes and much more. To access all these free bonus features, log on to: www.jasperfforde.com/specialfeatures.html and enter the code word as directed.
1
The absence of breakfast
'The Well of Lost Plots: To understand the Well you have to have an idea of the layout of the Great Library. The library is where all published fiction is stored so it can be read by the readers in the Outland; there are twenty-six floors, one for each letter of the alphabet. The library is constructed in the layout of a cross with the four corridors radiating from the centre point. On all the walls, end after end, shelf after shelf, are books. Hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Hardbacks, paperbacks, leather-bound, everything. But beneath the Great Library are twenty-six floors of dingy yet industrious sub-basements known as the Well of Lost Plots. This is where books are constructed, honed and polished in readiness for a place in the library above. But the similarity of all these books to the copies we read back home is no more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject; these books are alive.'
Making one's home in an unpublished novel wasn't without its compensations. All the boring day-to-day mundanities that we conduct in the real world get in the way of narrative flow and are thus generally avoided. The car didn't need refuelling, there were never any wrong numbers, there was always enough hot water, and vacuum-cleaner bags came in only two sizes upright and pull-along. There were other, more subtle differences, too. For instance, no one ever needed to repeat themselves in case you didn't hear, no one shared the same name, talked at the same time or had a word annoyingly 'on the tip of their tongue'. Best of all, the bad guy was always someone you knew of and Chaucer aside there wasn't much farting. But there were some downsides. The relative absence of breakfast was the first and most notable difference to my daily timetable. Inside books, dinners are often written about and therefore feature frequently, as do lunches and afternoon tea; probably because they offer more opportunities to further the story. Breakfast wasn't all that was missing. There was a peculiar lack of cinemas, wallpaper, toilets, colours, books, animals, underwear, smells, haircuts and, strangely enough, minor illnesses. If someone was ill in a book it was either terminal and dramatically unpleasant or a mild head cold there wasn't much in between.
I was able to take up residence inside fiction by virtue of a scheme entitled the Character Exchange Programme. Owing to a spate of bored and disgruntled bookpeople escaping from their novels and becoming what we called 'PageRunners', the authorities set up the scheme to allow characters a change of scenery. In any year there are close to ten thousand exchanges, few of which result in any major plot or dialogue infringements the reader rarely suspects anything at all. Since I was from the real world and not actually a character at all, the Bellman and Miss Havisham had agreed to let me live inside the BookWorld in exchange for helping out at Jurisfiction at least as long as my pregnancy would allow.
The choice of book for my self-enforced exile had not been arbitrary; when Miss Havisham asked me in which novel I would care to reside I had thought long and hard. Robinson Crusoe would have been ideal considering the climate but there was no one female to exchange with. I could have gone to Pride and Prejudice but I wasn't wild about high collars, bonnets, corsets and delicate manners. No, to avoid any complications and reduce the possibility of having to move, I had decided to make my home in a book of such dubious and uneven quality that publication and my subsequent enforced ejection were unlikely in the extreme. I found just such a book deep within the Well of Lost Plots among failed attempts at prose and half-finished epics of such dazzling ineptness that they would never see the light of day. The book was a dreary crime thriller set in Reading entitled Caversham Heights. I had planned to stay there for only a year but it didn't work out that way. Plans with me are like De Floss novels try as you might, you never know quite how they are going to turn out.
I read my way into Caversham Heights. The air felt warm after the wintry conditions back home and I found myself standing on a wooden jetty at the edge of a lake. In front of me there was a large and seemingly derelict flying boat of the sort that still plied the coastal routes back home. I had flown on one myself not six months before on the trail of someone claiming to have found some unpublished Burns poetry. But that was another lifetime ago, when I was with SpecOps in Swindon, the world I had temporarily left behind.
I donned a pair of dark glasses and stared at the ancient flying boat, which rocked gently in the breeze, tautening the mooring ropes and creaking gently. As I watched the old aircraft, wondering just how long something this decrepit could stay afloat, a well-dressed young woman stepped out of an oval-shaped door in the high-sided hull. She was carrying a suitcase. I had read Caversham Heights so I knew Mary well, although she didn't know me.
'Hello!' she shouted, trotting up and offering me a hand. 'I'm Mary. You must be Thursday. My goodness! What's that?'
'A dodo. Her name's Pickwick.'
Pickwick plocked and stared at Mary suspiciously.
'Really?' she replied, looking at the bird curiously. 'I'm no expert, of course, but I thought dodos were extinct.'
'Where I come from they're a bit of a pest.'
'Oh?' mused Mary. 'I'm not sure I've heard of a book with live dodos in it.'
'I'm not a bookperson,' I told her, 'I'm real.'
'Oh!' exclaimed Mary, opening her eyes wide. 'An Outlander.'
She touched me inquisitively with a slender index finger, as though I might be made of glass.
'I've never seen someone from the other side before,' she announced, clearly relieved to find that I wasn't going to shatter into a thousand pieces. 'Tell me, is it true you have to cut your hair on a regular basis? I mean, your hair actually grows?
'Yes.' I smiled. 'And my fingernails, too.'