Jasper Fforde - First Among Sequels

“Just in time!” barked Commander Bradshaw, who was standing on a table so as to be more easily seen. He was Jurisfiction’s longest-serving member and onetime star of the Commander Bradshaw colonial ripping adventure stories for boys. His jingoistic and anachronistic brand of British Empire fiction wasn’t read at all these days, which he’d be the first to admit was no great loss and freed him up to be the head of Jurisfiction, or Bellman, a post he was unique in having held twice. He and Mrs. Bradshaw were two of the best friends I possessed. His wife, Melanie, had been Friday and Tuesday’s au pair, and even though Jenny was now ten and needed less looking after, Mel was still around. She loved our kids as if they were her own. She and Bradshaw had never had children. Not surprisingly, really, since Melanie was, and had always been, a gorilla.

“Is everyone here?” he asked, carefully scanning the small group of Jurisfiction agents.

“Hamlet’s dealing with a potentially damaging outbreak of reasonable behavior inside Othello, ” said Mr. Fainset, a middle-aged man dressed in worn merchant navy garb. “He also said he needed to see Iago about something.”

“That’ll be about their Shakespeare spin-off play Iago v. Hamlet, ” said the Red Queen, who was actually not a real queen at all but an anthropomorphized chess piece from Through the Looking Glass. “Does he really think he’s going to get the Council of Genres to agree to a thirty-ninth Shakespeare play?”

“Stranger things have happened.” Bradshaw sighed. “Where are Peter and Jane?”

“The new feline in The Tiger Who Came to Tea got stage fright,” said Lady Cavendish, “and after that they said they needed to deal with a troublesome brake van in The Twin Engines. ”

“Very well,” said Bradshaw, tingling a small bell. “Jurisfiction meeting number 43,369 is now in session. Item One: The number of fictioneers trying to escape into the real world has increased this month. We’ve had seven attempts, all of them rebuffed. The Council of Genres has made it abundantly clear that this will not be tolerated without a Letter of Transit, and anyone caught moving across or attempting to move across will be reduced to text on sight.”

There was silence. I was the only one who crossed over on a regular basis, but no one liked the idea of reducing people to text, whether they deserved it or not. It was irreversible and the closest thing there was to death in the written world.

“I’m not saying you have to do that,” continued Bradshaw, “and I want you to pursue all other avenues before lethal force. But if it’s the only way, then that’s what you’ll do. Item Two: It’s been six months, and there’s still no sign of the final two volumes of The Good Soldier Švejk. If we don’t hear anything more, we’ll just bundle up the four volumes into one and reluctantly call it a day. Thursday, have you seen anything around the Well that might indicate they were stolen to order to be broken up for scrap?”

“None at all,” I replied, “but I spoke with our opposite number over at Jurisfiktivní, and he said they’d lost it over there, too.”

“That’s wonderful news!” breathed Bradshaw, much relieved.

“It is?”

“Yes-it’s someone else’s problem. Item Three: The inexplicable departure of comedy from the Thomas Hardy novels is still a cause for great concern.”

“Hadn’t we put a stop to that?” asked Emperor Zhark.

“Not at all,” replied Bradshaw. “We tried to have the comedy that was being leached out replaced by fresh comedy coming in, but because misery has a greater natural affinity for the Wessex novels, it always seems to gain the ascendancy. Hard to believe Jude the Obscure was once the most rip-roaringly funny novel in the English language, eh?”

I put up my hand.

“Yes, Thursday?”

“Do you think the Comedy genre might be mining the books for laughs? You know how those guys will happily steal and modify from anything and everywhere for even the most perfunctory of chuckles.”

“It’s possible, but we need hard evidence. Who wants to have a trawl around Comedy for a Thomas Hardy funnyism we can use to prove one way or the other?”

“I will,” said the Red Queen, before I could volunteer.

“Better get busy. If they are sucking the comedy out of Jude, we don’t have much time. Now that the farce, rib-cracking one-liners and whimsical asides have all been removed, a continued drain on the novel’s reserves of lightheartedness will place the book in a state of negative funniness. Insufferably gloomy-miserable, in fact.”

We thought about it for a moment. Even until as little as thirty years ago, the whole Thomas Hardy series was actually very funny-pointlessly frivolous, in fact. As things stood at the moment, if you wanted a happy ending to anything in Hardy, you’d be well advised to read it backward.

“Item Four,” continued Bradshaw, “a few genre realignments.”

There was an audible sigh in the air, and a few agents lost interest. This was one of those boring-but-important items that, while of little consequence to the book in question, subtly changed the way in which it was policed. We had to know what novel was in what genre-sometimes it wasn’t altogether obvious, and when a book stretched across two genres or more, it could open a jurisdictional can of worms that might have us tied up for years. We all reached for our note pads and pencils as Bradshaw stared at the list.

“Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? has been moved from nonfiction to fiction,” he began, leaving a pause so we could write it down, “and Orwell’s 1984 is no longer truly fiction, so has been reallocated to nonfiction. Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan is no longer Sci-fibut Philosophy.”

This was actually good news; I’d thought the same for years.

“The subgenre of Literary Smut has finally been disbanded, with Fanny Hill and Moll Flanders being transferred to Racy Novel and Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Human Drama.”

We diligently wrote it all down as Bradshaw continued:

“ The History of Tom Jones is now in Romantic Comedy, and The Story of O is part of the Erotic Novel genre, as are Lolita and The Autobiography of a Flea. As part of a separate genre reappraisal, Orwell’s Animal Farm belongs not just to the Allegorical and Political genres but has expanded to be part of Animal Drama and Juvenilia as well.”

“Four genres bad, two genres good,” murmured Mr. Fainset.

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing.”

“Good,” said Bradshaw, stroking his large white mustache. “Item Five: The entire works of Jane Austen are down in the maintenance bay for a refit. We’ve diverted all the Outlander readings through a book-club boxed set, and I want someone to patrol the series until the originals are back online. Volunteers?”

“I will,” I said.

“You’re on cadet assessment, Thursday. Anyone else?”

Lady Margaret Cavendish put up her hand. Unusually for a resident of fiction, she had once been real. Originally a flamboyant seventeenth-century aristocratic socialite much keen on poetry, women’s issues and self-publicity, our Lady Cavendish hailed from an unfair biography. Annoyed by the slurs committed, as so often to the defamed dead, she took flight to the bright lights of Jurisfiction, in which she seemed to excel, especially in the poetry form, which no one else much liked to handle.

“What would you have me do?” she asked.

“Nothing, really-just maintain a presence to make sure any mischievous character understudies think twice before they do their own dialogue or try to ‘improve’ anything.”