Literary sleuth scatters clues

The third installment in the Thursday Next series of literary adventure-thriller-fantasy novels by Jasper Fforde, “The Well of Lost Plots,” is pure candy for the book lover’s soul. The series, whose narrator is a female detective named Thursday Next, is set in a bizarre and brilliantly imagined world of literature, in which characters from well-known novels appear alongside made-up people and creatures and the laws of nature as we know them cease to exist. Characters pop in and out of books and take the place of well-known or lesser characters via the Character Exchange Program, but they must be careful to follow the edicts of Jurisfiction, the policing agency within BookWorld. Reading Fforde is like visiting an amusement park created especially for English majors and bibliophiles.

In this newest installment, Thursday Next, apprenticing as a trainee Jurisfiction agent to Miss Havisham of “Great Expectations,” is trying to keep alive the memories of her husband, Landen, who was done in by a nefarious character who had traveled back in time 38 years to off Landen as a 2-year-old, leaving only Thursday’s memories of him intact. Pregnant with Landen’s child and tired from her travails in “Jane Eyre” (“The Eyre Affair” and “Lost in a Good Book” are the first two books in the series), Thursday opts for the Character Exchange Program in the Well of Lost Plots, the 26 subbasements of the Great Library, where all books -- even those doomed to failure -- are constructed.

Books are created in the Well using a device that collects dialogue, humor and pathos to be hammered into story-code by wordsmiths. (“The beauty of the system is that authors never suspect a thing -- they think they do all the work.”)

Unpublished books in the Well outnumber published by an estimated eight to one, and the text to which Thursday is assigned shows why. She takes the place of a bland character named Mary Jones, sidekick to the hard-boiled investigating hero in the unpublished detective thriller “Caversham Heights.” This nascent pulp novel is hilariously bad, and Thursday strives to save it from being chopped up and sold in parts or thrown into the Text Sea. Meanwhile, Aornis Hades, Thursday’s archenemy, is doing her best to erase Thursday’s memories of Landen. Things reach the boiling point when Miss Havisham is killed and Thursday connects her demise to the about-to-be released new book-operating system, UltraWord. (There are always problems with upgrading book-operating systems, we learn. When the previous system was upgraded, “the system conflict wiped out the entire library at Alexandria -- they had to torch the lot to stop it spreading.”)

Along the way, Thursday conducts rage-counseling sessions for the characters of “Wuthering Heights,” learns of a search for the thief who stole the commas from James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and battles a spelling “vyrus” that changes the meaning of all it comes in contact with. Uriah Hope, for example, becomes Uriah Heep after being infected with the “vyrus,” and though he survives, he’s changed irrevocably. “Whilst before he had been adventurous, he was, thanks to the vyrus, cadaverous; thin instead of lithe, fawning instead of frowning.”

Thursday shares her character’s home with Ibb and Obb, “Generic” characters who slowly acquire personalities by studying elements like irony and sarcasm and picking up gender traits; she intervenes in a contract dispute with picketing nursery-rhyme characters, attends Jurisfiction meetings (which regularly begin with the question “Shall we wait for Godot?”) and successfully fights off an attack of grammasites, literary pests that infect a text with an overflow of gerunds. Ultimately she battles to undo the new, much-heralded book-operating system, under which, she discovers, “there will be no need for plotsmiths, echolocators, imaginators, holesmiths, grammatacists and spell-checkers.” The plot is convoluted, but it’s also replete with amusing literary allusions. Readers who believe themselves well read will have as much fun trying to catch the literary references as they will following the plot.”The Well of Lost Plots” is a lively hilarious romp into the world of fiction, calling on every shred of your knowledge of literature and providing immense satisfaction when you get the references and jokes. It’s the kind of book in which plot takes a backseat to the author’s funny, twisted imagination; readers will revel in this unorthodox tour of Jasper Fforde’s wonderfully weird, hyper-literary mind.