Lost in a Good Book (Thursday Next, #2)

by Jasper Fforde

Don’t expect the expected: Expect the unexpected. If you expect the expected I expect you will remain unexpected. – from the teachings of St Zvlkx

Cardenio was the name of the Ragged Knight in Cervantes’s Don Quixote who falls in love with Lucinda, and it is assumed Shakespeare’s play followed the same story. But we will never know. Not one single scrap of the play has survived.’ MILLON DE FLOSS – Cardenio – Easy Come, Easy Go

There were a lot of scholars who were versed well enough in Shakespeare, Elizabethan history, grammar and spelling to attempt a forgery, but none of them ever had the wit and charm of the Bard himself. Victor used to say that Shakespeare forgery was inherently impossible because the act of copying overrode the act of inspired creation – the heart being squeezed out by the mind, so to speak.

‘Remember, Thursday, that scientific thought – indeed, any mode of thought, whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else – is just like the fashions that we wear – only much longer lived. It’s a little like a boy band.’

My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored. ‘It would be much more remarkable,’ he would say, ‘if there weren’t any coincidences.’

‘Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer,

‘Since you can’t actually remember anything about who was here, your mind has just filled in the room with an amalgam of who you might expect to see in a teashop in Winchester. Mnemonic wallpaper, so to speak. There is nothing in this room that won’t be familiar. The cutlery is your mother’s and the pictures on the walls are all odd mixes of the ones we had up in the house. The waitress is a compound of Lottie from your lunch with Bowden and the woman in the chip shop. Every blank space in your memory has been filled with something that you do remember – a sort of shuffling of facts to fill in the gaps.’

‘There will be a slight delay in receiving the excuse for the lateness of the DeepDrop to Sydney, Miss Next. The reason for the delay in the excuse has yet to be established.’ Another check-in girl whispered something in her ear. ‘I’ve just been informed that the reason for the excuse for the delay has been delayed itself. As soon as we find out why the reason for the excuse has been delayed we will tell you – in line with government guidelines. If you are at all unhappy with the speed with which the excuse has been delivered, you might be eligible for a one per cent refund. Have a nice drop.’

‘Attention, please. Passengers for the 11.04 DeepDrop to Sydney will be glad to know that the delay was due to too many excuses being created by the Gravitube’s Excuse Manufacturing Facility. Consequently we are happy to announce that since the excess excuses have now been used, the 11.04 DeepDrop to Sydney is ready for boarding at Gate Six.’

‘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.’

‘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.

Zorf refused to sell any paintings to anyone who couldn’t see what they were, but to the Neanderthals who could see what they were, he gave them away, arguing that the bond between a painting and an owner should not be sullied by anything as obscenely sapien as cash.

The pink slime was washed away, leaving only earth and rocks, and as I watched the river moved away from us, meandered off into the flood-plain and then snaked back, swept under our feet, and then undulated back and forth like a snake before finally being replaced by a lake. We moved faster, and soon I could see the earth start to buckle as the crust bent and twisted under the force of plate tectonics. Plains dropped to make seas, and mountains rose in their place. New vegetation established itself as millions of years swept past in a matter of seconds. Vast forests grew and fell in seconds. We were covered, then uncovered, then covered again, now by sea, now by rock, now surrounded by an ice sheet, now a hundred feet in the air. More forests, then a desert, then mountains rose rapidly in the east, only to be scoured flat a few moments later.

‘Boojum: Term used to describe the total annihilation of a word/line/character/subplot/book/series. Complete and irreversible, the nature of a boojum is still the subject of some heated speculation. Some past members of Jurisfiction theorise that a Boojum might be a gateway to an “anti-library” somewhere beyond the “imagination horizon”. It is possible that the semi-mythical Snark may hold the key to deciphering what is, at present, a mystery.

Who Put the Poe in Poem?

‘I’ll tell you what love is,’ I said. ‘It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter!’

‘Anything is possible right now. We’re in the middle of an isolated high coincidental localised entropic field decreasement.’ ‘We’re in a what ?’ ‘We’re in a pseudoscientific technobabble.’