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The Thursday Next Series, by Jasper Fforde

The Eyre Affair; Lost in a Good Book; The Well of Lost Plots; Something Rotten; First Among Sequels; One of Our Thursdays is Missing; The Woman Who Died a Lot

“The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning.” From The Eyre Affair

One of my favorite fictional worlds is the one Jasper Fforde created for his literary detective, Thursday Next. That’s literary detective as in “law enforcement protecting literature from within.” Talk about a dream job.

Thursday lives in an alternate universe where the Crimean War continued well in to the 1980s, dodos were un-extincted, time travel is commonplace, and literature is a hot commodity: street riots break out between warring poetry gangs, Shakespearean evangelists go door to door, and Richard III is performed (with Rocky Horror-esque audience interaction) every week.  Thursday’s job is to help police the hot black market literature underworld, until things get really weird . . .

In her first installment, The Eyre Affair, Thursday is tasked with rescuing Jane Eyre, kidnapped from the pages of her novel with all of literature held captive.  To do so, she must learn to travel inside of fiction, opening up a world of adventures inside and outside of fiction. Over the course of her various adventures, Thursday becomes the leading defender of the written word, and believe me, fiction couldn’t have a better champion.  She’s a great character to center these stories around; plucky, determined, and with a strong sense of right and wrong that gets her in trouble (and out of) often.

Fforde’s writing and plots border at times on the ridiculous, but almost always in ways that work.  His storylines may be convoluted, but there are plenty of literary in-jokes and character cameos to deliver a payoff for fiction lovers.  Fforde expects his readers to be well-read and he rewards us for it.  If you’ve ever wondered what an anger management group therapy session would look like inside Wuthering Heights, your wait is over.

The series moves away from the fictional world in later books, but still offers plenty for book lovers to enjoy. My personal favorites are the first few, but I’ve eagerly awaited all them and never been disappointed. The plots are so rich and enjoyable that I hesitate to give away details and ruin the amusement that comes with, say, discovering whether there’s such a thing as a fair trial in fiction, or the practical difficulties of communicating via footnotes.

The Old Ballgame

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

Hardback $25.99; Paperback $14.99; Free at your local library

For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

Sports-based fiction, as a genre, isn’t really my cup of tea, mostly because the sports I enjoy watching don’t translate well to the written word. I’ll spend a fall Sunday watching hours of football, but reading it? No thanks. I attribute it to the difference in pace. What is fast and hard-hitting in the game becomes tedious. But baseball, as Chad Harbach points out in The Art of Fielding, is different.

Baseball works in fiction because the pace of a good novel matches the pace of a good game. There are slowly-building tension and sudden bursts of activity, spread out, hopefully, over the course of the game or novel.  And baseball is about relationships; nothing else in sports compares to the storyline between pitcher and hitter.

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding brings baseball to life, and it would be easy to write it off as another sports book. Easy to do, perhaps, but shamefully inaccurate. The baseball scenes are well-written, but what he really nails are the relationships. The story focuses on several players for the Westish College Harpooners: shortstop phenom Henry Skrimshander; journeyman catcher Mike Schwartz; intellectual right-fielder Owen Dunne; and members of the school administration: President Guert Affenlight and his newly-returned daughter Pella.  Henry is the team star, one game away from a record for error-less games, when tragedy strikes and shakes all of these characters out of their carefully constructed roles.

Like a baseball game, this book is all about relationships: between sexual relationship between Owen and Affenlight, the mentor/student relationship between Henry and Schwartz. All of their lives are changed with one mistimed throw, forcing them to redefine themselves and their relationships. Some of them do that willingly, others have to be drug on kicking and screaming (figuratively, at least).  I was struck most by how richly imagined the characters are. They are all distinct and complex, but accessible. The only exception is Pella Affenlight, who isn’t as fully realized and whose storyline doesn’t fit as neatly.

This is a book to be enjoyed like a baseball game: on a lazy summer weekend with a cold iced tea near to hand. You don’t have to take my word on it, though: the New York Times considered it one of the best books of 2011.