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Thursday Next, tired of being the head of Jurisfiction and living in one of the unpublished books found in THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS, returns home to Swindon with her two-year-old son, Friday, her pair of dodos, Pickwick and her son Alan, and Hamlet, prince of Denmark. She sets up housekeeping with her mother, in the home in which she grew up, tries to get her old job in SpecOps back, attempts to uneradicate her husband, Landen Parke-Laine, and also tries to prevent Yorick Kaine from killing the president and declaring himself dictator of her world. We first met Thursday in THE EYRE AFFAIR. She interfered in that book and changed the ending. She is still awaiting sentencing on that matter. Then, in LOST IN A GOOD BOOK, she immured Goliath Corporation's Jack Schitt in the stanzas of Poe's THE RAVEN, and Goliath eradicated her husband. Miss Havisham and Thursday jump into the pages of literature to try to retrieve Schitt. As mentioned above, Thursday became a Jurisfiction executive and lived in a book in THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS until she finally got tired of the limited viewpoint of fiction, and returned to Swindon, only to find that Goliath Corporation had joined forces with Yorick Kaine and were still trying to take over the world. With the help of her father, a renegade member of the ChronoGuard, a branch of the police force that tries to keep time running in a proper manner, Thursday manages to save the world and get Landen back. Once you have accepted Fforde's universe, as set out in the first three novels of the series, SOMETHING ROTTEN reads like a normal alternative history book. If you accept that, at least as late as 1985, the Crimean War was still being fought and that literature is not stable, that is, if the special operatives don't watch out, the plot of a play or novel can be changed, then everything is normal. If you haven't read any of Fforde's earlier books in the series, go and do so right now. Don't start with SOMETHING ROTTEN, it would be too confusing. This may be the last book in the series, but no one is ever sure where Fforde is concerned. Either way, go and read them all, especially if you are a Monty Python or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, August 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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