Something Rotten
Jasper Fforde
In which a few things get wrapped up
The Well of Lost Plots ended with loose ends hanging all over the place and flapping in the wind. (Do not attempt to read Something Rotten without first reading books 1-3 of the Thursday Next series: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, and The Well of Lost Plots. It will make no sense without the background. Honestly, the Thursday Next series is difficult enough to follow even read in order.) We ended The Well of Lost Plots with a literal deus ex machina. To counter the dissolution of the fictional world by UltraWord™, Thursday pulled the emergency handle in her Jurisfiction TravelBook (that's the machina), calling forth the Great Panjandrum (the deus), who put things right.
One of the Great Panjandrum's actions was to name Thursday to the position of Bellman -- i.e., the head of Jurisfiction. Thus, we begin Something Rotten with Thursday running the law enforcement authority of English fiction. Two years have passed since the end of The Well of Lost Plots -- her child Friday has been born and is now a troublesome boy who occasionally babbles in Lorem ipsum -- the meaningless Latin-like text used by publishers to fill up sample publications. Out in the Real World, where Thursday has been absent for two years, her husband Landen is still eradicated -- one of those loose ends I mentioned above.
Thursday is of course anxious to get to work fixing this, so she takes a leave of absence from being Bellman and returns to the Real World. Tagging along, because there's something rotten in the play Hamlet, is Hamlet himself. Another loose end is that Yorrick Kaine is still out there trying to become Dictator of England. And of course we still have Goliath up to dirty tricks old and new.
It will come as no surprise that Thursday's efforts don't go smoothly. What did surprise me, however, is that by the end of the book the future looks simpler than it did at the beginning. Not every loose end is wrapped up, but a significant fraction of them are. (Although perhaps not permanently -- a Thursday Next fan knows well that what appeared to be a well-tied knot can still come undone.) I was glad to see this. I hope Jasper Fforde can avoid the George R.R. Martin catastrophe, where the author loses control of the plot and profusion of minor characters.
It's all tremendous fun, as usual. My biggest difficulty with the Thursday Next books is that they're kind of exhausting -- there's so much going on that they strain the reader's mental facilities (mine at least). Thus I was glad to get a hint that Fforde is working to get it under control.