Jasper Fforde - The Well of Lost Plots

'I won't say a word,' I assured him as we avoided a trader trying to sell us surplus B-3 Darcy clones, 'but do many people try and sell off parts of their own book?'

'Oh yes,' replied Bradshaw. 'But only if they are out of print and can spare it. Trouble is,' he went on, 'I'm a bit strapped for the old moolah. What with the BookWorld Awards coming up and Mrs Bradshaw a bit shy in public I thought a new dress might be just the ticket — and the cost of clothes is pretty steep down here, y'know.'

'It's the same in the Outland.'

'Is it, by George?' He guffawed. 'The Well always reminds me of the market in Nairobi; how about you?'

'There seems to be an awful lot of bureaucracy,' I observed. 'I would have thought a fiction factory would be, by definition, a lot more free and relaxed.'

'If you think this is bad, you ought to visit non-fiction. Over there, the rules governing the correct use of a semi-colon alone run to several volumes. Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corruption and error hard-wired at inception, m'girl. I'm surprised you hadn't figured that out yet. What do you think of the Well?'

'I'm still a bit new to it,' I confessed.

'Really?' he replied. 'Let me help you out.'

He stopped and looked around for a moment, then pointed out a man in his early twenties who was walking towards us. He was dressed in a long riding jacket and carried a battered leather suitcase emblazoned with the names of books and plays he had visited in the course of his trade.

'See him?'

'Yes?'

'He's an artisan — a holesmith.'

'He's a plasterer?'

'No; he fills narrative holes, plot and expositional anomalies — Bloopholes . If a writer said something like: "The daffodils bloomed in summer" or: "They checked the ballistics report on the shotgun", then artisans like him are there to sort it out. It's one of the final stages of construction just before the grammatacists, echolocators and spellcheckers move in to smooth everything over.'

The young man had drawn level with us by this time.

'Hello, Mr Starboard,' said Bradshaw to the holesmith, who gave a wan smile of recognition.

'Commander Bradshaw!' he muttered slightly hesitantly. 'What a truly delightful honour it is to meet you again, sir. Mrs Bradshaw quite well?'

'Quite well, thank you. This is Miss Next — new at the department. I'm showing her the ropes.'

The holesmith shook my hand and made welcoming noises.

'I closed a hole in Great Expectations the other day,' I told him. 'Was that one of your books?'

'Goodness me no!' exclaimed the young man, smiling for the first time. 'Holestitching has come a long way since Dickens. You won't find a holesmith worth his thread trying the old "door opens and in comes the missing aunt/father/business associate/friend, etc.", all ready to explain where they've been since mysteriously dropping out of the narrative two hundred pages previously. The methodology we choose these days is to just go back and patch the hole, or more simply, to camouflage it.'

'I see.'

'Indeed,' carried on the young man, becoming more flamboyant in the light of my perceived interest, 'I'm working on a system that hides holes by highlighting them to the reader, which just says: "Ho! I'm a hole, don't think about it!", but it's a little cutting-edge. I think,' added the young man airily, 'that you will not find a more experienced holesmith anywhere in the Well; I've been doing it for more than forty years.'

'When did you start?' I observed, looking at the youth curiously. 'As a baby?'

The young man aged, greyed and sagged before my eyes until he was in his seventies and then announced, arms outstretched and with a nourish:

'Da-daaaa!'

'No one likes a show-off, Llyster,' said Bradshaw, looking at his watch. 'I don't want to hurry you, Tuesday, old girl, but we should be getting over to Norland Park for the roll-call.'

He gallantly offered me an elbow to hold and I hooked my arm in his.

'Thank you, Commander.'

'Stouter than stout!' Bradshaw laughed, and read us both into Sense and Sensibility .

The offices of Jurisfiction were situated at Norland Park, the house of the Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility . The family kindly lent the ballroom to Jurisfiction on the unspoken condition that Jane Austen books would be an area of special protection.

Norland Park was located within a broad expanse of softly undulating grassland set about with ancient oaks. The evening was drawing on, as it generally did when we arrived, and wood pigeons cooed from the dovecote. The grass felt warm and comfortable like a heavily underlaid carpet, and the delicate scent of pine needles filled the air.

But all was not perfect in this garden of nineteenth-century prose; as we approached the house there seemed to be some sort of commotion. A demonstration, in fact — the sort of thing I was used to seeing at home. But this wasn't a rally about the price of cheese or whether the Whig Party were dangerously right wing and anti-Welsh, nor about whether Goliath had the right to force legislation compelling everyone to eat SmileyBurger at least twice a week. No, this demonstration was one you would expect to find only in the world of fiction.

The Bellman, elected head of Jurisfiction and dressed in the garb of a town crier, was angrily tingling his bell to try to persuade the crowd to calm down.

'Not again ,' muttered Bradshaw as we walked up. 'I wonder what the Orals want this time?'

I was unfamiliar with the term, and since I didn't want to appear foolish, I tried to make sense of the crowd on my own. The person nearest to me was a shepherdess, although that was only a guess on my part as she didn't have any sheep — only a large crook. A boy dressed in blue with a horn was standing next to her discussing the falling price of lamb, and next to them was a very old woman with a small dog which whined, pretended to be dead, smoked a pipe and performed various other tricks in quick succession. Standing next to her was a small man in a long nightdress and bed hat who yawned loudly. Perhaps I was being slow, but it was only when I saw a large egg with arms and legs that I realised who they were.

'They're all nursery rhyme characters!' I exclaimed.

'They're a pain in the whatsit, that's what they are,' murmured Bradshaw as a small boy jumped from the crowd, grabbed a pig and made a dash for it. Bo-Peep hooked his ankle with her crook and the boy sprawled headlong on the grass. The pig rolled into a flower bed with a startled oink and then beat a hurried escape as a large man started to give the boy six of the best.

'… all we want is the same rights as any other character in the BookWorld,' said Humpty Dumpty, his ovoid face a deep crimson. 'Just because we have a duty to children and the oral tradition doesn't mean we can be taken advantage of.'