Something Rotten
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| Author | Jasper Fforde |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Thursday Next |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy novel |
| Publisher | Viking Adult |
| Released | August 5, 2004 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 320 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0670033596 |
| Preceded by | The Well of Lost Plots |
| Followed by | First Among Sequels (unpublished) |
Something Rotten is the fourth book in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. It continues the story some two years after the point where The Well of Lost Plots leaves off.
Received with adulation by the growing Fforde fan club, the book has also won wide critical acclaim, with most mainstream reviewers calling it his best book yet. It consolidates Fforde's position as one of the leading British exponents of comic metafiction.[citation needed]
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
The book sees Thursday return from the world of fiction to the alternative Swindon that Fforde introduced in The Eyre Affair; she is accompanied by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, whose excursion from the world of fiction with Thursday forms the main sub-plot.
[edit] Explanation of the novel's title
The title is taken from Hamlet I.iv: "Something is rotten in the State of Denmark".
[edit] Plot summary
The story opens with Thursday still in the world of fiction in her job as the Bellman, head of the literary police force Jurisfiction. She is still on the trail of the Minotaur that escaped in the last book; she is tiring of fiction however and longs to return to her own world and to get back her husband Landen, who was eradicated from time by the evil Goliath Corporation in 1947. Despite Landen's eradication Thursday still has his son (Friday Next) who is now two years old and has an interesting vocabulary having been brought up inside books so far. (He babbles in Lorem Ipsum, a pseudo-Latin excerpt traditionally used to demonstrate typefaces.)
Thursday and Friday return to her mother (Wednesday) in Swindon, with Hamlet who is accompanying them on an excursion to the Outland. Her mother, whose main functions appears to be to make tea and to provide Battenberg cake, has some curious house guests: Emma Hamilton, Otto von Bismarck, and a family of dodos. Both humans are apparently staying for a rest, while Thursday's father (who has now been re-admitted to the ChronoGuard) sorts out various parts of history for them.
Despite her earlier transgressions that caused her to flee to the book world in the first place, Thursday gets her job back at SpecOps-27 as a Literary Detective and catches up with her old colleagues. She learns that Yorrick Kaine has joined forces with Goliath Corporation and plans to oust the aging English President George Formby. Kaine as Prime Minister wields some mysterious persuasive influence over Parliament and the people, and has used it to pass some bizarre laws and to stir up hatred of Denmark. Yorrick has also taken out a hit on her: an assassin known as "The Windowmaker", who is actually Cindy Stoker, the wife of Thursday's longtime friend, Spike.
Thursday's father warns her that Kaine's ambitions may cause nuclear armageddon and that it is up to her to stop him. On top of this, she is visited by tearful agents from the book world (Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and the Emperor Zhark) who tell her that all sorts of things are going wrong without her leadership, and in Hamlet's absence Polonius and his family have taken over the play and teamed up with the Merry Wives of Windsor to re-write it. Meanwhile her most pressing problem is finding reliable child-care for Friday.
Goliath Corporation have decided to become the new world religion so that more people will believe in them and have embarked on a programme to apologize for everything they have done wrong in the past. Thursday goes to see them -- at their head quarters in the Isle of Man -- and gets a promise that they will un-eradicate Landen in exchange for her forgiveness. Thursday feels duped when she finds that through some form of mind control she has formally forgiven them, even though there is no sign of her husband. Then suddenly he is back, but he keeps coming and going for a while, like the Cheshire cat. The cat himself (who has already featured in series) also turns up towards the end to help Thursday finish off Kaine.
Nothing is simple in Fforde's world however, so despite besting Kaine, Thursday still has to escape assassination and to help the Swindon Mallets to win the 1988 World Croquet League Superhoop final in order to thwart Kaine and Goliath and avoid the impending end-of-the-world.
She succeeds but not without a near-death experience and a visit to the gateway to the Underworld (which turns out to be a planned-but-never-built service station on the M4 motorway). The final chapters contain some curious time travel paradoxes in which Thursday meets her future self and her unborn grand children.
[edit] Major themes
Fforde deftly uses time travel as one of the key themes in the book.
[edit] Trivia
The book comes with "Special Features" as if it were a special DVD edition of a film. These special features, which include a "Making Of Wordamentary" and some deleted scenes, are accessible on Fforde's website.
[edit] Footnotes
[edit] References
- Fforde, Jasper (5 August 2004). Something Rotten, 1st ed., Viking Press. ISBN 0670033596.
| Novels by Jasper Fforde | |
| Thursday Next series | |
|---|---|
| The Eyre Affair | Lost in a Good Book | The Well of Lost Plots | Something Rotten | First Among Sequels (due July 2007) | |
| Jack Spratt series | |
| The Big Over Easy | The Fourth Bear | The Last Great Tortoise Race (due 2007) | |
