Discworld and Member Articles
|
Meet an author of the quirky and surreal
|
|
|
Written by terrypratchettbooks.org
Wednesday, 14 September 2005 |
By Jo Steele of Cape Argus (ZA)
You know you've made it as an author when a festival is held in your honour and two fans name their baby daughter after your main character.
But that's now.
It took 10 years and 76 rejection letters before a publisher showed any interest at all in Jasper Fforde's work.
His fifth book, The Big Over Easy, has just been published and he was in Cape Town to promote it.
The book is a Humpty Dumpty murder mystery and is the first of a new series featuring Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and Sergeant Mary Mary of the Nursery Crimes Division of Reading Police.
In this alternative reality Solomon Grundy is a footcare magnate and
Prometheus is an asylum seeker.
Humpty Dumpty, well-known nursery favourite, ex-convict, former millionaire philanthropist and large egg, is found shattered beneath a wall in a shabby part of town.
Evidence points to his ex-wife who has conveniently shot herself, but DI Spratt and Sgt Mary are not so sure it was she.
They soon find themselves knee-deep in money-laundering, bullion smuggling and major problems with beanstalks.
It may all seem a little... well, strange and far-fetched, but strange is what Fforde is known for.
His previous four books featured Thursday Next, a literary detective who jumps in and out of fiction, saving masterpieces from char-
acter theft and vandalised plot lines.
In The Eyre Affair, heroine Jane Eyre has been kidnapped by bad guy Acheron Styx, who after holding the minor characters of Dickens's novels to ransom has moved on to cause problems in another of the nation's favourite books, Jane Eyre. But Thursday enters the plot and saves the day by making sure that Mr Rochester and Jane do marry, as Charlotte Bronte intended.
In the next books in the series, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten, Thursday's husband Landon, is edited out of existence, which makes things difficult when Thursday discovers she's pregnant.
Fforde said: "It is hard to describe my work. It's quirky and surreal. They are thrillers. They are books for people who like books."
He says if you want to compare his writing to anything, it is probably Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
Although his fan base is growing steadily, and readers include the likes of Terry Pratchett, author of the acclaimed Discworld books, he says he still goes into bookshops and rearranges the shelves to make sure his work is prominently at eye level.
"Sometimes the Fs can be on the bottom shelf so I just move them up a bit."
He started out in the film industry where he spent 19 years as a focus puller, working on films such as Golden Eye, The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment.
But Fforde, who lives in Wales and is a father of four, has always written for fun in his spare time.
He says he is much better suited to the world of words than film, because he can play all the roles.
"You can be all the characters as well as direct what is happening. You play everything."
He is the biggest critic of his work, edits his work for months "until it is ripped out of my hands by my publishers" and will throw away whole chapters if he feels he must.
But he is not one of those authors who feels the need to wake up in the early hours to write or write a certain number of words a day. He just writes in his office at home from about 8am to 5pm.
He says he is flattered by the fact that his Thursday Next series has proved so popular with fans that one British couple even named their newborn daughter Thursday.
He said: "That was very flattering. They still send me pictures of her. She's three now."
And this weekend the first Fforde Festival is being held in Swindon, England, where the Thursday Next books are set.
Fforde said: "The festival was set up by some fans, not by me, although I have been asked to attend."
His previous books have included famous literary characters such as Jane Eyre, Hamlet and Miss Haversham, so who would he like to write about next?
He said: "One of the Jane Austen girls or Darcy. I think that would be fun."
What about a contemporary character from fiction - such as Bridget Jones?
He said: "Well, there are copyright issues and that's the reason I use the classics, although I did get permission to use Mrs Tiggy-Winkle in one of my books."
Future plans include a book about Goldilocks and the Three Bears -"I think there's some marital disharmony there as mummy bear and daddy bear are sleeping in separate beds." He also plans to write another Thursday Next book.
But in the meantime he's enjoying being in Cape Town - his first visit - and he's itching to go and visit the aviation museum at Ysterplaat to indulge his other passion - aviation.
 |
|
|
Subscribe to this comment's feed