Jasper Fforde - Lost in a Good Book

‘Two hundred miles in every direction,’ said the cat offhandedly, beginning to purr, ‘twenty-six floors above ground, twenty-six below.’

‘You must have a copy of every book that’s been written,’ I observed.

‘Every book that will ever be written,’ corrected the cat, ‘and a few others besides.’

‘How many?’

‘Well, I’ve never counted them myself but certainly more than twelve.’

‘You’re the Cheshire cat, aren’t you?’ I asked.

‘I was the Cheshire cat,’ he replied with a slightly aggrieved air. ‘But they moved the county boundaries, so technically speaking I’m now the “Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat”, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it. Oh, and welcome to Jurisfiction. You’ll like it here; everyone is quite mad.’

‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ I replied indignantly.

‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’

I snapped my fingers.

‘Wait a moment!’ I exclaimed. ‘This is the conversation you had in Alice in Wonderland , just after the baby turned into a pig!’

‘Ah!’ returned the cat with an annoyed flick of his tail. ‘Fancy you can write your own dialogue, do you? I’ve seen people try; it’s never a pretty sight. But have it your own way. And what’s more, the baby turned into a fig, not a pig.’

‘It was a pig, actually.’

‘Fig,’ said the cat stubbornly. ‘Who was in the book, me or you?’

‘It was a pig,’ I insisted.

‘Well!’ exclaimed the cat. ‘I’ll go and check. Then you’ll look pretty stupid, I can tell you!’

And so saying, he vanished.

I stood there for a moment or two, and pretty soon the cat’s tail started to appear, then his body and finally his head and mouth.

‘Well?’ I asked.

‘All right,’ grumbled the cat. ‘So it was a pig. My hearing is not so good; I think it’s all that pepper. By the by, I almost forgot. You’re apprenticed to Miss Havisham.’

‘Miss Havisham? Great Expectations Miss Havisham?’

‘Is there any other? You’ll be fine—just don’t mention the wedding.’

‘I’ll try not to. Wait a moment—apprenticed?’

‘Of course. Getting here is only half the adventure. If you want to join us you’ll have to learn the ropes. Right now all you can do is journey. With a bit of practice on your own you might learn to be page accurate when you jump. But if you want to delve deep into the back-story or take an excursion beyond the sleeve notes, you’re going to have to take instruction. Why, by the time Miss Havisham has finished with you, you’ll think nothing of being able to visit early drafts, deleted characters or long-discarded chapters that make little or no sense at all. Who knows, you may even glimpse the core of the book, the central nub of energy that binds a novel together.’

‘You mean the spine?’ I asked, not quite up to speed yet.

The cat lashed its tail.

‘No, stupid, the idea, the notion, the spark . Once you’ve laid your eyes on the raw concept of a book, everything you’ve ever seen or felt will seem about as interesting as a stair carpet. Try and imagine this: you are sitting on soft grass on a warm summer’s evening in front of a dazzling sunset; the air is full of truly inspiring music and you have in your hands a wonderful book. Are you there?’

‘I think so.’

‘Okay, now imagine a simply vast saucer of warm cream in front of you and consider lapping it really slowly until your whiskers are completely drenched.’

The Cheshire cat shivered deliriously.

‘If you do all of that and multiply it by a thousand, then perhaps, just perhaps , you will have some idea of what I’m talking about.’

‘Can I pass on the cream?’

‘Whatever you want. It’s your daydream, after all.’

And with a flick of his tail, the cat vanished again. I turned to explore my surroundings and was surprised to find that the Cheshire cat was sitting on another shelf on the other side of the corridor.

‘You seem a bit old to be an apprentice,’ continued the cat, folding its paws and staring at me so intensely I felt unnerved. ‘We’ve been expecting you for almost twenty years. Where on earth have you been?’

‘I… I… didn’t know I could do this.’

‘What you mean is that you did know that you couldn’t —it’s quite a different thing. The point is, do you think you have what it takes to help us here at Jurisfiction?’

‘I really don’t know,’ I replied, truthfully enough, adding ‘What do you do?’ as I didn’t see why he should be asking all the questions.

‘I,’ said the cat proudly, ‘am the librarian.’

‘You look after all these books?’

‘Certainly,’ replied the cat proudly. ‘Ask me any question you want.’

‘ Jane Eyre ,’ I said, intending only to ask its location but realising when the cat answered that a librarian here was far removed from the sort I knew at home.

‘Ranked the 728th favourite fictional book ever written,’ the cat replied parrot-fashion. ‘Total readings to date: 82,581,430. Current reading figure 829,321—1,421 of whom are reading it as we speak. It’s a good figure; quite possibly because it has been in the news recently.’

‘So what’s the most read book?’

‘Up until now or for ever and all time?’

‘For all time.’

The cat thought for a moment.

‘In fiction, the most read book ever is To Kill a Mocking Bird . Not just because it is a cracking good read for us, but of all the vertebrate überclassics it was the only one that really translated well into Arthropod. And if you can crack the lobster market—if you’ll pardon the pun—a billion years from now, you’re really going to flog some copies. The Arthropod title is: tlkîltlîlkîxlkilkïxlklï or, literally translated, The past non-existent state of the angel fish . Atticus Finch is a lobster called Tklîkï , and he defends a horseshoe crab named Klikïflik .’

‘How does it compare?’

‘Not too bad, although the scene with the prawns is a little harrowing. It’s the crustacean readership that makes Daphne Farquitt such a major player, too.’

‘Daphne Farquitt?’ I echoed with some surprise. ‘But her books are frightfull !’

‘Only to us. To the highly evolved Arthropods, Farquitt’s work is considered sacred and religious to the point of lunacy. Listen, I’m no fan of Farquitt’s but her bodice-ripping pot-boiler The Squire of High Potternews sparked one of the biggest, bloodiest, shellbrokenist wars the planet has ever witnessed.’

I was getting off the point.

‘So all these books are your responsibility?’

‘Indeed,’ replied the cat ainly.

‘If I wanted to go into a book I could just pick it up and read it?’

‘It’s not quite that easy,’ replied the cat. ‘You can only get into a book if someone has already found a way in and then exited through the library. Every book, you will observe, is bound in either red or green. Green for go, red for no-go. It’s quite easy, really—you’re not colour blind, are you?’

‘No. So if I wanted to go into—oh, I don’t know, let’s pull a title out of the air— The Raven , then—’

But the cat flinched as I said the title.

‘There are some places you should not go !’ he muttered in an aggrieved tone. ‘Edgar Allan Poe is one of them. His books are not fixed; there is a certain oddness that goes with them. Most macabre Gothic fiction tends to be like that—Sade is the same; also Webster, Wheatley and King. Go into those and you may never come out—they have a way of weaving you into the story and before you know it you’re stuck there. Let me show you something.’