Jasper Ffordes’s world is very much like ours, but also completely different. Society is dominated by over-mighty corporations, (in this case, Goliath) overweening governments, a network of quasi-official organisations with no accountability to anyone, an intrusive media and politicians who range from the ineffectual to the downright smarmy. Britain is a divided place, where Wales is a break-away socialist state, while England is an increasingly marginalized rump, bogged down in a hopeless war. In our world, the Crimean war came to an end, in this one it is ongoing and as desperate and horrible as any in our reality.

Day to day life for the populace is strongly influenced by issues about art, literature and history. Television is dominated by stage-managed news and comment and laughably dreadful quiz shows, like Name That Fruit! The powers that be have a frightening ability to intervene in history and change what they don’t approve of, to the point of deleting events and people altogether. This is what happened to Thursday Next’s father, a member of the shadowy Chronoguard, till they erased him. Now he is a reality only in the memory of Thursday, her mother and remaining sibling. He occasionally appears in their time-stream, often bringing further chaos with him. As Thursday finds to her cost, the Chronoguard’s attentions are by no means restricted to her father. Thursday Next (herself a play on words) is no skulking outsider, she is very much part of the establishment and a lot of the plot and her character development arise from that. She is employed by the literary detection arm of the Special Operations Network (Spec Ops) but is regularly seconded to other arms, at the behest of her superiors. Her family includes her erased father, a mother whose grievances against her disappointing husband have not been mellowed by this event, a classically eccentric inventor uncle and one brother who is a vicar, as well as another who died in the Crimea.

It hardly needs saying that humour is very much a part of what Jasper Fforde does. He uses it in satirical comment on our world. For example, readers who can remember the 1970s adverts for the Milk Marketing Board will enjoy the one for the Toast Marketing Board at the back of the book. In both our reality and his alternative world, corporations use heavy marketing to sell an everyday item as if it was the latest thing. He also uses humour to highlight aspects of his imagined universe, like the advert for Pete and Dave’s Dodo Emporium. Animals that are extinct in our world have been cloned in this one and are regularly kept as household pets. Thursday has a sweet little dodo called Pickwick, who comments on her comings and goings with an endearing series of ‘plocks!’

For all his commitment to scene setting, characterisation, and social comment, Fforde does not neglect his plot and in this first volume, the dastardly figure of Acheron Hades is at the centre of it. Hades is an old-fashioned villain with a heinous scheme, the destruction of English literature. He has the super-villain’s capacity for survival and enough charm to make the reader wonder if he’ll get away with it and maybe even hope that he will.

Between Hades, the Chronoguard, Spec Ops and the Goliath Corporation, the lives of Thursday and those close to her are fraught with danger, sadness and loss. However, Fforde never allows his heroine to lose her courage or her sense of the absurd. He immerses the reader in a world where power matters as much as it does in our own and where what we see, hear and read is important. He flatters our cultural capital while also highlighting our failure to value culture as much as we should. Jasper Fforde is a comic novelist with a high-minded purpose and has an appeal for a wide range of readers and book-lovers.

Hodder and Stoughton, London. 2001. ISBN: 978-0-340-7333561.  373pp.