Weekly Reader Thursday Next Edition: Something Rotten (The Thursday Next Series Vol. IV) by Jasper Fforde; Return to Swindon Brims With Shakespearean Jokes and Comedy

Weekly Reader Thursday Next Edition: Something Rotten (The Thursday Next Series Vol. IV) by Jasper Fforde; Average Return to Swindon Brims With Shakespearean References and Comedy




By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




Spoilers: On Jasper Fforde's website, he stated that when he wrote The Well of Lost Plots, that he missed writing about Swindon and Thursday Next’s eccentric family, so he had Thursday immediately leave Book World to return in the next book, Something Rotten.

Unfortunately, I am just the opposite. Swindon is nice and it's good to see some characters returning like Thursday's time-hopping father and her well-meaning but intrusive mum. As before with the books there are plenty of humorous moments, literary references, and strange situations. But darn it all, I miss Book World!

Anybody could write about a place like Swindon, anybody. It takes a true creative spirit like Fforde to take his and other literary characters and build an entire world around them with its creatures, rules, technology, and events. It's like coming down from the ultimate Imagination Trip or a high. You have been to this exciting colorful place that afterward seems like a let down.
It's not that Something Rotten is a bad book. It's great, but the Swindon setting is dull in comparison to the bright, imaginative, colorful Book World.


Anyway, Thursday misses her normal life in Swindon so after two years as the Bellman (leader in Book World), she returns to Swindon with her two-year-old son, Friday and memories of her still-eradicated husband, Landen. No sooner does she return to her hometown and her LiteraTec job in Spec Ops, than she as usual is hit with problems.

First, she has to bring Hamlet along so he can study how the various Outlander play productions and movies portray him. In his absence, the other characters in Hamlet revolt and write their own play called The Tragedy of the Not-At-All Boring Polonious, Father of the Noble Laertes, Who Avenged His Fair Sister Ophelia, Who Was Driven Mad by the Callousness of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Catchy title aside, the characters need a master copy and since one no longer exists Thursday has to find a clone of Shakespeare's to break up their revolution and set things straight with the characters.

St. Zvlkx, a friar from the 11th century has returned to Swindon and his prophecies are spot on including that something bad will happen after Swindon wins the Super Hoop Croquet Tournament. So Thursday and co. have to dust out their mallets and do some footwork on the croquet field.

The Goliath Corporation is suddenly declaring itself a religion and Yorrik Kaine, who had been a disgraced politician and a fictional escapee from Book World, now suddenly has gained a cult-like following and goes on a rampage against all things Danish (Don't ask.) including burning books by Danish authors. Not to mention that Landen is still eradicated and Thursday is the target of an assassin who kills by slapstick (No, really don't ask.)

Let's get the good stuff out of the way first. The way Fforde draws in Hamlet is pretty clever. According to Thursday, he is concerned that he is portrayed as a “ditherer” and he would worry even if he had nothing to worry about so he makes the most out of his trip to the Outland. He compares notes on various productions with his favorite being the Zeffirelli Film where he is played by Mel Gibson (“Horatio is played by Danny Glover, yes?”) He also spends some time flirting with Lady Emma Hamilton, the mistress of Lord Horatio Nelson who is staying in the Next home after a time traveling expedition gone awry.
Thursday also reveals a secret shared among book, author, and Reader. Everyone brings a little of themselves into what they read so each time they read a book, they experience it differently. “To each their own Hamlet,” she says.

Thursday deals with the various adventures with her usual cunning and resourcefulness, particularly when she is assigned to locate and destroy Danish books. She sends SpecOps agents in the wrong places (“The Danish Embassy is the first place they think we’ll look! Check the Singaporean Embassy instead!”) while gathering up all the Danish books by truck loads and sneaking them into the Socialist Republic of Wales. (By a stroke of luck, there also happens to be a Shakespeare clone in Wales so two of her problems are resolved.)

There is some great attempts at political satire with the character of Yorrik Kaine. A political figure with no previous experience suddenly luring followers against a select group and creating legions of fans who are mesmerized by his every word and swayed by his “off-the-cuff-he-tells-it-like-it-is” shtick may sound awfully familiar until you realize this book was published in 2004! Still, the parallels are so uncanny that this Reader wondered if Kaine’s followers wore hats that said “Make Swindon Great Again,” before they were considered cool.

There are parts that don't work so well. After the nuances and cleverness that Fforde gave to the various literary characters, the Swindon characters just aren't as interesting.

After three books, Thursday finally gets Landen back. But his return is so anticlimactic and his presence in the book is so minor that he may as well have stayed gone. 

There are a couple of new characters like St. Zvlkx and an assassin called the Windowmaker (a typo on the business card) that seem very Pythonesque in their characterizations. They have some interesting clever moments, but they are more set up as jokes, jokes that run thin after awhile. 

Many of the various plots and characters don't jell as well as they had in the first three books. They make a hodgepodge of ideas that don't go anywhere and aren't tied together very well. The less said about the croquet and Goliath-as-religion plots, the better.

Something Rotten was intended to be the final book in this tier of the Thursday Next series and it shows. Certain storylines are wrapped up and character's identities are revealed. One revelation appears odd at first, but it makes sense the more one thinks about it and answers several questions.
The other character revelation doesn't work quite so well because it leaves a large gaping plot hole about how another character didn't know about that person’s identity. Not only that but another possibility would have made a lot more sense.

Something Rotten is okay for a normal book series but when the previous three Thursday Next books were so creative, so clever, and so bursting with literariness and imagination, it becomes even more of a shame than it should be.