This comic confection, a alternate-universe thriller that wears its pop culture influences so easily, seems to call out for logline summaries on the order of "Harry Potter for the crowd that never gave up on Monty Python" or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer with books."
Our heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a dystopian late twentieth century in which Britain and Russia are still fighting the Crimean War more than a century after it began, the fast way to get from London to Swindon is by dirigible, and literature is a very, very serious matter.
Airport vending machines deliver soliloquies from Shakespeare, and a nation is rocked by the "disappearance" of the title character from all editions of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Although Thursday is scanted in emotional depth and psychological subtlety, she is well-endowed with grit, as she chases a demonic criminal mastermind across the pages. But that's what's called for in this book, overstuffed as it is with movie-friendly incidents and technological gadgets, all inventions of Thursday's Bondish Q stand-in, her uncle Mycroft.
Thursday is the sort of role that Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock would clamor to play, though the role really should go to someone like Kate Beckinsale or Robin Tunney.
While the action is fast, the wordplay is often sly.
The fictional kingdom of Ruritania is memorialized as the name of an airship; Milton Keynes surfaces as the name of a deceased criminal.
I almost missed the perhaps obligatory nod to Lewis Carroll in this literary wonderland: thanks to cloning and "reverse extinction," Thursday keeps a pet dodo (though he's named Pickwick, not D-d-dodgson).
The book's chief weakness is an awkward shift in chapter 11 from Thursday's first person account to an omniscient narrator. Of course, given the places that the novel visits, a sustained Thursday-centered point of view isn't really possible.
But the jump, about a third of the way in, is quite jarring.
Still, any world in which Hispano-Suizas are still in production, or in which Richard III gets the Rocky Horror Show treatment (the audience begins the show by asking, "When is the winter of our discontent?") is one worth visiting.
