The Well of Lost Plots: A Thursday Next Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "The Well of Lost Plots..." (more)
Key Phrases: mispeling vyrus, scout car, seventeenth floor, Miss Havisham, Council of Genres, Miss Next (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this delicious sequel to The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book, Fforde's redoubtable (and now throwing-up-pregnant) heroine Thursday Next once again does battle with philistine bibliophobes, taking a furlough from her duties as a SpecOps Literary Detective to vacation in the Well of Lost Plots, the 26 noisome sub-basements of the Great Library. Pursued by her memory-modifying nemesis Aornis Hades, Thursday joins Jurisfiction's Character Exchange Program, filling in for "Mary," sidekick to the world-weary detective hero of Caversham Heights, a hilariously awful police procedural. At the imminent launch of UltraWord, the vaunted "Last Word" in Story Operating Systems, Thursday's friend and mentor Miss Havisham is gruesomely killed, and Thursday gamely sets out to restore order to her underground world, where technophiles ruthlessly recycle unpublished books and sell plot devices and stock characters on the black market. Meanwhile, Aornis is doing her fiendish worst to make Thursday forget Landen, her missing husband and father of her child. If this all sounds a bit confusing, it isuntil the reader gets the hang of Fforde's intricate mix of parody, social satire and sheer gut-busting fantasy. Marvelous creations like syntax-slaughtering grammasites and the murderous Minotaur roam this unusual novel's pages, and Fforde's fictional epigraphs, like his minihistory of "book operating systems," are worth the cover price in themselves. Fforde's sidesplitting sendup of an increasingly antibookish society is a sheer joy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–Fforde's third novel featuring English sleuth Thursday Next is an interesting, enjoyable mix of detective story, fantasy, and literature. Thursday works on cases involving the protection of the stories and characters of famous books, which can be affected and changed by people in the real world. In this installment, she enters the Book World itself. Fforde has a nice touch, never pressing on any one aspect of the story, but managing to interweave all of the elements, with a good deal of humor. The use of various literary characters means that it helps to be familiar with the works in which they appear, but, despite knowing very little about Anna Karenina, it is still very funny to read its plot written as a gossipy telephone conversation between two Russian noblewomen. It also helps to have read the first two books in the series, The Eyre Affair (2002) and Lost in a Good Book(2003, both Viking), but teens will want to read The Well of Lost Plotsanyway.–Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First American Edition edition (February 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670032891
• ISBN-13: 978-0670032891
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #610,551 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This is item 3 in The Thursday Next Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Crack it open and, pow, the story goes off at a tangent.", April 20, 2004

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

In his previous two novels, Fforde created a wacky, fictional universe in which "real world" characters could transport themselves into books, associate with the characters there, turn back the clock, and even change the endings. Heroine Thursday Next, has saved Jane Eyre from disaster, imprisoned Jack Schitt in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," and ended the Crimean War, but she has also made enemies of some powerful criminals, one of whom has gone back in time and killed off her husband when he was just a small child. Now, pregnant, she is the only person who can remember him as an adult, and her memory is failing. Anxious for a rest, she decides to go with her dodo Pickwick to visit the Well of Lost Plots, where all book characters, plots, and settings reside until they are chosen for novels.

In this most literary of Fforde's three novels, Thursday is an apprentice agent-in-training for JurisFiction, the policing agency that works inside books, her mentor and guide being Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. Living inside an unpublished crime thriller, Thursday explores the Great Library, where the Cheshire Cat is librarian, sees the workshop for backstories (some used, some not), meets generic characters ("human canvases without paint") and "orals" (nursery rhyme characters), tours available settings (high-capped mountains, arched stone bridges, ruined castles), and watches as Miss Havisham joyrides in "Chitty Bang Bang." Holesmiths work there fixing holes in narratives, grammatacists try to prevent grammacites (gerunds) and mispeling vyruses from infecting novels, and pace-setters, moodmongers, and plot speculators work on new creations.

As the Well considers installing the UltraWord operating system, which will expand the basic eight-plot architecture into thirty-two plots, Thursday tries to preserve the memory of Landen, fight against her enemies, and win her trial for a fiction infraction. Fforde pulls out all the stops here, creating a carnival ride through books and the creative process with surprises and delights on every page. Less plot-driven than the previous novels, this novel is episodic, with scenes ranging from a Star Wars-type bar scene to a group counseling session for the characters in Wuthering Heights. While Thursday's exact role is not always clear, Fforde's ability to free the reader's imagination and keep him/her involved in the literary world with its infinite possibilities is daunting. Full of satire, parody, puns, literary jokes, and word play, this latest in the Thursday Next series provides hours of entertainment for anyone interested in books and how they "work." Mary Whipple

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious Send-Up of Literature and Writing, July 18, 2004

By	Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

From the first chapter of Jasper Fforde's third novel, you can tell that the author had a blast writing this satiric mystery that explores the creation of fiction. Thursday Next - pregnant by her eradicated husband, haunted by a Hades sister intent on destroying her memory, and a Jurisfiction apprentice to none other than Miss Havisham of Dickens fame - takes refuge in a poorly written and unpublished crime novel called Caversham Heights. Thursday expects to rest there until the birth of her child, but she and Miss Havisham discover that the death of another agent by a Minotaur attack might not be the accident it seems. Meanwhile, nursery rhyme characters threaten a strike for not being treated like other fictional characters, two generic characters living with Thursday begin to become more well-rounded, and Thursday tries to save Caversham Heights from being destroyed by the Council of Genres for being so hopelessly bad.

The more you know about literature, the more hilarious you'll find this fantasy. Characters are being manufactured in record numbers because Vikram Seth is planning a new novel, and no one wants a return to minimalism simply because of a character shortage. Heathcliff, Catherine, and the rest of the characters from Wuthering Heights attend anger management classes, and Mr. Toad is relentless in his competition with Miss Havisham for the fastest driver in both the Book World and the Outland. And if you're interesting in writing, you'll gain tips for keeping your novel out of the Text Sea, as Fforde pokes fun at hackneyed writing and incomplete character development.

Because this is my first Fforde novel, I started reading this without any knowledge of what has happened previously in the series, but the author provides enough of a synopsis in the beginning to give a new reader the proper bearings. Despite this, there remains a disjointedness at times as so much satire is pumped into the book that does little to advance the plot. Sometimes Thursday seems to be there purely as a straight man, raising the question that perhaps Fforde should have heeded some of his own lessons in fiction writing. Fortunately, these lapses are few and don't hinder the enjoyment of the novel as a whole. This relatively long novel is not demanding and can be read more quickly than the page count might indicate.

As a literary joke, The Well of Lost Plots is a triumph. As a mystery/fantasy, it is less successful. Readers will nonetheless delight in Fforde's imagination as he takes them through the land of the unpublished and the more solid, though more turbulent, ground of the classics.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Beware - lost puns, October 15, 2004

By	Amanda Richards "Modest to the extreme" (Georgetown, Guyana) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Well of Lost Plots (Thursday Next Series) (Paperback)

The third installment in the Thursday Next series took me longer to read than the other two put together. It seemed to me to be an expansion of "Lost in a Good Book", written to set the stage for "Something Rotten".

Stop shaking your heads - it's a good book, filled with adventure and incidental stories, but essentially Thursday's story doesn't advance very far from book two. She's still pregnant, Landon doesn't exist yet, and she's still hiding out in the BookWorld.

This time, Fforde takes us through the Great Library and Well of Lost Plots in much greater detail, and his imagination is as fertile as ever, making book lovers purr with excitement as characters from great works of fiction interact with each other.

The BookWorld is a fascinating place, where grammasites stampede around changing text, spam has infiltrated the footnoterphone system, and plot devices are sold like cheap Rolexes. Dangerous creatures abound, real and fictional, human, animal and half bred, and the vast Text Sea can change the flow of booklife at any time.

Thursday must overcome pregnancy limitations, the deaths of her coworkers in Jurisfiction, and insidious plots; deal with dodo rearing, training of generic characters, and saving her less than perfect book-home, and also rack her brains to defeat the memory changing Aornis Hades. The worst challenge of all is something even more terrifying - something that drives fear into the hearts of people everywhere - the dreaded computer software upgrade.

Jasper Fforde is still very clever, but this time he's not as punny.

Warning: Not recommended to be read without the benefit of the first two novels.

Amanda Richards October 16, 2004