Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 2 - The Well of Lost Plots

VIP免费

2024-12-02 0 0 611.15KB 212 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 03 - The Well of Lost Plots

The Well of Lost Plots

Jasper Fforde

For Mari Who makes the torches burn brighter

A wise man wants for only nourishing cabbage soup; seek not other things. Except perhaps a toaster.

– from the teachings of St Zvlkx™

the wisdom of St Zvlkx™ is wholly owned by

the Toast Marketing Board

Thursday Next: the story so far …

Swindon, Wessex, England, circa 1985. SpecOps is the agency responsible for policing

areas considered too specialised to be tackled by the regular force, and Thursday Next is

attached to the literary detectives at SpecOps 27. Following the successful return of Jane

Eyre to the novel of the same name, vanquishing master criminal Acheron Hades and

bringing peace to the Crimean peninsula, she finds herself a minor celebrity.

On the trail of the seemingly miraculous discovery of the lost Shakespeare play Cardenio,

she crosses swords with Yorrick Kaine, escapee from fiction and neo-fascist politician.

She also finds herself blackmailed by the vast multinational known as the Goliath

Corporation, who want their operative Jack Schitt out of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven' in

which he was imprisoned. To achieve this they call on Lavoisier, a corrupt member of the

time-travelling SpecOps elite, the ChronoGuard, to kill off Thursday's husband. Travelling

back thirty-eight years, Lavoisier engineers a fatal accident for the two-year-old Landen,

but leaves Thursday's memories of him intact – she finds herself the only person who

knows he once lived.

In an attempt to rescue her eradicated husband, she finds a way to enter fiction itself – and

discovers that not only is there a policing agency within the BookWorld known as

Jurisfiction, but that she has been apprenticed as a trainee agent to Miss Havisham of

Great Expectations. With her skills at bookjumping growing under Miss Havisham's stern

and often unorthodox tuition, Thursday rescues Jack Schitt, only to discover she has been

duped. Goliath have no intention of reactualising her husband, and instead want her to

open a door into fiction, something Goliath has decided is a 'rich untapped marketplace'

for their varied but ultimately worthless products and services.

Thursday, pregnant with Landen's child and pursued by Goliath and Acheron's little sister

Aornis, an evil genius with a penchant for clothes shopping and memory modification,

decides to enter the BookWorld and retire temporarily to the place where all fiction is

created: the Well of Lost Plots. Taking refuge in an unpublished book of dubious quality

as part of the Character Exchange Programme, she thinks she will have a quiet time.

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Jas...0Well%20Of%20Lost%20Plots%20(v1.1%20htm).html (1 of 212) [10/15/2004 12:52:28 AM]

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 03 - The Well of Lost Plots
Acknowledgements
Extract from Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (copyright © Evelyn Waugh 1945) 
by permission of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop on behalf of the Evelyn Waugh Trust and the 
Estate of Laura Waugh.
Reference to the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (copyright © The National Trust for 
Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty) by kind permission of A. P. Watt Ltd.
References to Shadow the Sheepdog by Enid Blyton by kind permission of Enid Blyton 
Limited and with thanks to Chorion plc.
Frederick Warne & Co. is the owner of all rights, copyrights and trademarks in the Beatrix 
Potter character names and illustrations.
Extract from Tiger Tiger (copyright © Alfred Bester 1955) by kind permission of the 
Estate of Alfred Bester and The Sayle Literary Agency.
Contents
 1. The absence of breakfast
 2. Inside Caversham Heights
 3. Three witches, multiple choice and sarcasm
 4. Landen Parke-Laine
 5. The Well of Lost Plots
 6. Night of the grammasites
 7. Feeding the minotaur
 8. Ton sixty on the A419
 9. Apples Benedict, a hedgehog and Commander Bradshaw
10. Jurisfiction session number 40319
11. Introducing UltraWord™
12. Wuthering Heights
13. Reservoir near the Church of St Stephen
14. Educating the Generics
15. Landen Parke-somebody
16. Captain Nemo
17. Minotaur trouble
18. Snell Rest in Peece and Lucy Deane
19. Shadow the Sheepdog
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Jas...0Well%20Of%20Lost%20Plots%20(v1.1%20htm).html (2 of 212) [10/15/2004 12:52:28 AM]

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 03 - The Well of Lost Plots

20. Ibb and Obb named and Heights again

21. Who stole the tarts?

22. Crimean nightmares

23. Jurisfiction session number 40320

24. Pledges, the Council of Genres and searching for Deane

25. Havisham: the final bow

26. Post-Havisham blues

27. The lighthouse at the edge of my mind

28. Lola departs and Heights again

29. Mrs Bradshaw and Solomon (Judgements) Inc.

30. Revelations

31. Tables turned

32. The 923rd Annual BookWorld Awards

33. UltraWord™

34. Loose ends

This book has been bundled with Special Features including: the 'making of' wordamentary, deleted

scenes from all three books, out-takes and much more. To access all these free bonus features, log on to:

www.jasperfforde.com/specialfeatures.html and enter the code word as directed.

The absence of breakfast

'The Well of Lost Plots: To understand the Well you have to have an idea of the

layout of the Great Library. The library is where all published fiction is stored so it

can be read by the readers in the Outland; there are twenty-six floors, one for each

letter of the alphabet. The library is constructed in the layout of a cross with the four

corridors radiating from the centre point. On all the walls, end after end, shelf after

shelf, are books. Hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Hardbacks, paperbacks,

leather-bound, everything. But beneath the Great Library are twenty-six floors of

dingy yet industrious sub-basements known as the Well of Lost Plots. This is where

books are constructed, honed and polished in readiness for a place in the library

above. But the similarity of all these books to the copies we read back home is no

more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject; these books are alive.'

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Jas...0Well%20Of%20Lost%20Plots%20(v1.1%20htm).html (3 of 212) [10/15/2004 12:52:28 AM]

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 03 - The Well of Lost Plots

THURSDAY NEXT – The Jurisfiction Chronicles

Making one's home in an unpublished novel wasn't without its compensations. All the boring day-to-day

mundanities that we conduct in the real world get in the way of narrative flow and are thus generally

avoided. The car didn't need refuelling, there were never any wrong numbers, there was always enough

hot water, and vacuum-cleaner bags came in only two sizes – upright and pull-along. There were other,

more subtle differences, too. For instance, no one ever needed to repeat themselves in case you didn't

hear, no one shared the same name, talked at the same time or had a word annoyingly 'on the tip of their

tongue'. Best of all, the bad guy was always someone you knew of and – Chaucer aside – there wasn't

much farting. But there were some downsides. The relative absence of breakfast was the first and most

notable difference to my daily timetable. Inside books, dinners are often written about and therefore

feature frequently, as do lunches and afternoon tea; probably because they offer more opportunities to

further the story. Breakfast wasn't all that was missing. There was a peculiar lack of cinemas, wallpaper,

toilets, colours, books, animals, underwear, smells, haircuts and, strangely enough, minor illnesses. If

someone was ill in a book it was either terminal and dramatically unpleasant or a mild head cold – there

wasn't much in between.

I was able to take up residence inside fiction by virtue of a scheme entitled the Character Exchange

Programme. Owing to a spate of bored and disgruntled bookpeople escaping from their novels and

becoming what we called 'PageRunners', the authorities set up the scheme to allow characters a change of

scenery. In any year there are close to ten thousand exchanges, few of which result in any major plot or

dialogue infringements – the reader rarely suspects anything at all. Since I was from the real world and

not actually a character at all, the Bellman and Miss Havisham had agreed to let me live inside the

BookWorld in exchange for helping out at Jurisfiction – at least as long as my pregnancy would allow.

The choice of book for my self-enforced exile had not been arbitrary; when Miss Havisham asked me in

which novel I would care to reside I had thought long and hard. Robinson Crusoe would have been ideal

considering the climate but there was no one female to exchange with. I could have gone to Pride and

Prejudice but I wasn't wild about high collars, bonnets, corsets – and delicate manners. No, to avoid any

complications and reduce the possibility of having to move, I had decided to make my home in a book of

such dubious and uneven quality that publication and my subsequent enforced ejection were unlikely in

the extreme. I found just such a book deep within the Well of Lost Plots among failed attempts at prose

and half-finished epics of such dazzling ineptness that they would never see the light of day. The book

was a dreary crime thriller set in Reading entitled Caversham Heights. I had planned to stay there for only

a year but it didn't work out that way. Plans with me are like De Floss novels – try as you might, you

never know quite how they are going to turn out.

I read my way into Caversham Heights. The air felt warm after the wintry conditions back home and I

found myself standing on a wooden jetty at the edge of a lake. In front of me there was a large and

seemingly derelict flying boat of the sort that still plied the coastal routes back home. I had flown on one

myself not six months before on the trail of someone claiming to have found some unpublished Burns

poetry. But that was another lifetime ago, when I was with SpecOps in Swindon, the world I had

temporarily left behind.

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Jas...0Well%20Of%20Lost%20Plots%20(v1.1%20htm).html (4 of 212) [10/15/2004 12:52:28 AM]

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 03 - The Well of Lost Plots

I donned a pair of dark glasses and stared at the ancient flying boat, which rocked gently in the breeze,

tautening the mooring ropes and creaking gently. As I watched the old aircraft, wondering just how long

something this decrepit could stay afloat, a well-dressed young woman stepped out of an oval-shaped

door in the high-sided hull. She was carrying a suitcase. I had read Caversham Heights so I knew Mary

well, although she didn't know me.

'Hello!' she shouted, trotting up and offering me a hand. 'I'm Mary. You must be Thursday. My goodness!

What's that?'

'A dodo. Her name's Pickwick.'

Pickwick plocked and stared at Mary suspiciously.

'Really?' she replied, looking at the bird curiously. 'I'm no expert, of course, but … I thought dodos were

extinct.'

'Where I come from they're a bit of a pest.'

'Oh?' mused Mary. 'I'm not sure I've heard of a book with live dodos in it.'

'I'm not a bookperson,' I told her, 'I'm real.'

'Oh!' exclaimed Mary, opening her eyes wide. 'An Outlander.'

She touched me inquisitively with a slender index finger, as though I might be made of glass.

'I've never seen someone from the other side before,' she announced, clearly relieved to find that I wasn't

going to shatter into a thousand pieces. 'Tell me, is it true you have to cut your hair on a regular basis? I

mean, your hair actually grows?'

'Yes.' I smiled. 'And my fingernails, too.'

'Really?' Mary reflected. 'I've heard rumours about that but I thought it was just one of those Outlandish

legends. I suppose you have to eat, too? To stay alive, I mean, not just when the story calls for it?'

'One of the great pleasures of life,' I assured her.

I didn't think I'd tell her about the real-world downsides such as tooth decay, incontinence or old age.

Mary lived in a three-year window and neither aged, died, married, had children, got sick nor changed in

any way. Although appearing resolute and strong minded she was only like this because she was written

that way. For all her qualities, Mary was simply a foil to Jack Spratt, the detective in Caversham Heights,

the loyal sergeant figure to whom Jack explained things so the readers knew what was going on. She was

what writers called an expositional, but I'd never be as impolite as to say so to her face.

'Is this where I'm going to live?'

I was pointing at the shabby flying boat.

'I know what you're thinking.' Mary smiled proudly. 'Isn't she just the most beautiful thing ever? She's a

Sunderland; built in 1943 but last flew in '68. I'm midway through converting her to a houseboat, but

don't feel shy if you want to help out. Just keep the bilges pumped out, and if you can run the number-

three engine once a month I'd be very grateful – the start-up checklist is on the flight deck.'

'Well – okay,' I muttered.

'Good. I've left a précis of the story taped to the fridge and a rough idea of what you have to say, but don't

worry about being word perfect; since we're not published you can say almost anything you want – within

reason, of course.'

'Of course.'

I thought for a moment.

'I'm new to the Character Exchange Programme,' I said. 'When will I be called to do something?'

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Jas...0Well%20Of%20Lost%20Plots%20(v1.1%20htm).html (5 of 212) [10/15/2004 12:52:28 AM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

JasperFforde-ThursdayNext03-TheWellofLostPlotsTheWellofLostPlotsJasperFfordeForMariWhomakesthetorchesburnbrighterAwisemanwantsforonlynourishingcabbagesoup;seeknototherthings.Exceptperhapsatoaster.–fromtheteachingsofStZvlkx™thewisdomofStZvlkx™iswhollyownedbytheToastMarketingBoardThursdayNext:thestor...

展开>> 收起<<

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 2 - The Well of Lost Plots.pdf

共212页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 2 - The Well of Lost Plots

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: