The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco
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| Samuel Pepys by John Hayls: thanks to Wikipedia |
Author: Thursday Next (but written by a ghost writer)
Publisher: Not known
Source book: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde (Thursday Next #5)
Thursday Next sells the rights to the first four books of her life story and seriously regrets this decision. The Thursday Next 1-4 who features in these books; The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten (all also real books in the real world) is involved in far more sex and violence than our own beloved Thursday who is devoted to her family, and only shoots if absolutely necessary. Thursday regains some editorial control over the fifth book in the series, The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco (not a real book in the real world), and tries to make the fictitious Thursday 5 a bit less action packed and a bit more touchy feely. Unfortunately, this makes the book much less popular with her readers who are more interested in guns than curtains and macramé.
The only thing we learn (vaguely) about The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco is that Thursday Next 5 drinks herbal tea and affects tie dye T shirts and curtains. Thursday 1-4 describes it as ‘a crock of shit’. Not a promising review.
In the end Thursday 1-4, not a nice person, is sentenced to be marooned in The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco where she is erased and the book is nibbled away by a swirling cloud of dust and debris, and reduced to an undescriptive textdust (and thus no longer exists) leaving Thursday 5 with nowhere to go. But then she is directed to rebuild books 1-4. Yes, once again it’s complicated.
And then, in One of Our Thursdays is Missing, we discover that Thursday was responsible for adding a Great Fire of London (which never actually happened) to the historical record. Subsequently two entire weeks of Samuel Pepys’s diary had to be deleted. And then The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco*is also deleted. Not a book anymore. Confused? You will be.
*It features in the list of books by Jasper Fforde at the front of his books… but crossed out.
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| Samuel Pepys by Sir Godfrey Kneller: thanks to National Endowment for the Humanities |
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