The Well Of Lost Plots
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The Well of Lost Plots is the third book by Jasper Fforde and the continuation of the adventures of literary detective Thursday Next from The Eyre Affair and Lost In A Good Book. Published in 2003, the book is set entirely within the jurisdiction of JurisFiction, the police force of fiction.
Apprentice JurisFiction agent and SpecOps-27 operative Thursday Next is taking a much-needed vacation inside Caversham Heights, a never-published detective novel inside the Well of Lost Plots. While waiting for her child to be born (she's pregnant and her husband Landen was erased from existence by the ChronoGuard in the last book), she encounters, while she pretends to be the character she is replacing, two Generics, tabula rasas who have yet to be assigned to a book, and DCI Briggs, a detective who partners with her in investigating a murder. Since Thursday is an "Outlander", a person who isn't just a character in a book, Briggs hopes that she will help them appeal to the Council of Genres not to have Caversham Heights deconstructed.
Using a houseboat on Caversham Heights as her base of operations, Thursday continues her apprenticeship with Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. Not only is a fictional character -- Yorrick Kaine, the "discoverer" of Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio in the last book -- loose in Thursday's real world, a person from Thursday's world has entered the BookWorld and is conspiring with him and Text Grand Central, the final arbitrators of plot, setting, and other story elements, to release BOOK version 9, code-named UltraWord. (For the reader's convenience, every book you have ever read is a version 8.3.)
UltraWord is touted at a JurisFiction meeting as the greatest advance "since the invention of movable type" because it creates a thirty-two plot story system and allows the reader to control the story. However, Thursday is warned by the witches from Macbeth to not trust the three-read rule. Thursday becomes a full JurisFiction agent, and she accompanies Miss Havisham to the Outland to find out who's entered the BookWorld and used an escaped minotaur and a "mispeling vyrus" (sound it out) to cover his tracks.
In her dreams, Thursday slowly loses her memory of Landen. Aornis Hades, the villainess (and incidentally the sister of Acheron Hades, the Villain of The Eyre Affair), who nearly covered the world in Dream Topping, is present in her memory as a mindworm. Aornis called forth what she thought was Thursday's worst nightmare in the Crimean War and is then defeated by one of Thursday's childhood fears. Miss Havisham is lost when the automobile she's driving is wrecked, detectives Snell and Perkins die from the vyrus, and Thursday is accompanied by Trafford Bradshaw, a former big game hunter, to the local franchise of The Judgment of Solomon. There they learn that Harris Tweed, Kaine's partner, is masquerading as a JurisFiction agent to get UltraWord released in order to simplify literature. At the 923rd Annual BookWorld awards, Thursday proves to the seven million assembled that UltraWord will render literature merely a sellable commodity -- the thrice-read rule makes a book published with UltraWord impossible to read after three trials, thus rendering libraries and secondhand bookstores useless. Thursday produces two skylarks, one from a older book that is described poetically, and the other from an UltraWord book that is described flat and literally.
In this unprecented emergency, Thursday breaks open the "IN UNPRECENTED EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS" in her JurisFiction operative TravelBook and pulls the handle to make the Great Panjandrum, ruler of the BookWorld, appear. The Panjandrum calls for an immediate vote (which goes against UltraWord) and calls on Thursday to take the job of Bellman, the superintendent of JurisFiction. Text Grand Central is placed under a committee by the Council of Genres "to ensure TGC would be too inefficient and unimaginative to pose a threat". The two Generics, now calling themselves Randolph and Lola, Thursday, and her pet dodo Pickwick take R&R in Caversham Heights, which was bought by the Council of Genres as character sanctuary -- a solution that particularly appeals to the residents of the novel as well as the nursery rhyme characters who were going to go on strike.
The American edition of The Well of Lost Plots has an extra chapter documenting the weathering of a WordStorm during Thursday's tenure as Bellman.
The story continues in Something Rotten.de:Im Brunnen der Manuskripte