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sawylI only got into Jasper Fforde's books at the tail end of last year when I finally realised, having seen him in action at last year's con, that his work was very much my sort of thing. Which meant that Fforde's Guest of Honour interview was a must. So here's a rough outline, partly from notes and partly from memory — so, obviously, all the mistakes are mine — of Fforde being interviewed by Lewis P. Bear:
(Bear) How would you introduce yourself and your work?
(Fforde) It’s hard to give a quick overview of what Jasper Fforde’s books are about. It’s the Jasper Fforde role playing game: how do you describe them in a couple of words? The answer is to just read the books. Which makes him a publisher’s nightmare: because they can’t just put the tag line "Just read the book" on the cover! It’s mostly absurdist comedy. How did I put it recently? "I’ve supped at the feast of storytelling and made away with the scraps..."
(Bear) You've been accused of being elitist because you have to have read things to get the jokes!
(Fforde) I’m not a fan of elitism. And you don’t really need to know more than that Shakespeare wrote plays and Jane Eyre is a victorian pot-boiler to get most of it. Writing about Jane Eyre, I was aware that people wouldn't know it, so I dropped in a potted précis — the joke being you don't muck around with classic literature. But of course you should! There are spoilers for Jane eyre for people who haven't read it.
(Bear) One noticeable thing is the word play, although sometimes I look at the names and think there must be a joke in there somewhere even if I can’t see it!
(Fforde) I love word play and there's usually a joke in the names. (My favourite puns is "marmalade is the preserve of breakfast” It’s just delightfully rounded!) There’s a long tradition of silly names going all the way back to people like Dickens. Landen Park-Laine is a monopoly joke! The best properties to have were orange and red; so the ones you land on after going to jail are the best because there are multiple ways of getting there. But the purple ones have prestige which is why you have Park-Laine — because you know his parents were well-to-do! (The greatest joy of my life was to beat my older brother at Monopoly. I was eleven!) But the names weren’t changed for the American edition — so he should have been Park-Place, because the U.S. version of monopoly is based on Atlantic City — so the pun didn’t work.
Paige Turner was a stealth pun. It was so groan-worthy that I didn’t feel I could use it, so I either called her page or Miss Turner right up to the very end when — bam! — I finally hit you with the full joke. Stealth. Pun.
Bowden Cable is also pun — it’s the name of the sleeve cable on a brake, invented by Raleigh for their bikes.
(Bear) So, cameras? Why don't you use digital?
(Fforde) It’s about living in a post skill environment. Click and there it is, it's trying to attain a skill and get the results you want and there's something romantic about getting the right result first time, it's like writing the perfect sentence. You don't even need to remember anymore — you just need to know where to look it up. But it's a pointless skill!
(Bear) Children have vast computer skills but they don't know to loose up the answers! Whereas I have almost no skills and I just look it up on Wikipedia... Which has mislead me before... Have you checked your page?
(Fforde) Not recently...
(Bear) I wouldn’t. There’s someone with your name, but he’s nothing like you. But he does claim to have written books with the same titles as yours...
(Fforde) ...I’ll call my lawyer!
[Fforde gets out his camera geeks out about it for a while, taking it to pieces and reasembling it. As he goes to put it away he bumps it on the table] ...and you can use them to knock in tent pegs!
I was a camera and stills assistant. Large and superlarge forms. Now all the super expensive cameras from the old days are dirt cheap on eBay, so I can afford all these things that I never thought I’d own. But the biggest cost is time these days.
(Bear) Spray and hope photography is absurdly expensive.
(Fforde) Which goes back to word usage. Paparazzi aren’t really photographers in a sense. They’re not after something with artistic merit, they just want something that people will pay for. They’re a rough bunch and they have some interesting language. When they’re taking photos of an actress, they talk about "hosing the dolly” because it’s what they do: she comes out and it's click-click-click and they’re hosing the dolly. It’s strange and chilling, but its also very English and it’s exactly what they’re doing...
(Bear) ...and it’s now very cheap with digital...
(Fforde) ... but it’s still expensive in term of access and placement.
(Bear) Who wrote Shakespeare?
(Fforde) I believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare! As you’ll know from the books...
(Bear) Yes, you should all go out and read it...
(Fforde) You don’t need to read it. You just need to buy it!
(Bear) Buy two: one to keep and one to read; because your eyes will wear out the pages...
(Fforde) I’ve found that glasses wear out over time. I have them for a few years and I look through them and after a while I find they’ve worn out and I have to get a new pair...
(Bear) Shakespeare!
(Fforde) The Eyre Affair is mostly jokes about who wrote Shakespeare. All of the various theories appear at some point
[Bear lists some of the theories]
(Fforde) So I believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. But which one: the London or Stratford? Because people say that there is nothing to link the two. Except when the London one talks about the actors he worked with in Stratford. So they’re only completely separate until facts get in the way of the theory.
It’s like the Marlowe thing. People say that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare, except when you point out that he would have had to have written plays after he died.
(From the floor) Marlowe faked his own death!
(Fforde) Yes, stabbed in the eye in a tavern in Deptford in front of 30 witnesses so that he could carry on writing plays as someone else...
(Bear) Deptford has really improved since then! Southwark too. I was put up there not long ago and I thought it would be in a place that charged by the hour but it was actually quite a nice flat.
(Fforde) Why are things called flats when they’re not flat and apartments when they’re together not apart? And mint tea? Don’t ask me for mint tea — there’s no such thing — it’s mint infusion! And Shakespeare? He hasn’t written anything good in years. But if he was alive now he’d be living in LA. Working as a script doctor...
(Bear) When is the next book and which one is it?
(Fforde) I can’t seem to write standalone books. The Eyre Affair, The Last Dragonslayer, Shades of Grey, they were also suppose to be standalone; but their worlds were so large that they became series. And now everyone asks about the their favourite series and when the next book is going to be out. And I have to disappoint them.
The next one is going to be called Early Riser and its set in a world where everyone has always hibernated. I’m kind of claiming it's going to be out in 2016, but I think I’ll be lucky to have a draft done by January. But I’m sticking with the name.
How could I be so stupid, writing in the back of Shades of Grey that there were going to be two sequels!
(Bear) There was such a sheer wonderful number of colour names in it...
(Fforde) ...I had to make some of them up. If our world was dominated colours we’d have slang words for them all. As it is, red is pretty good, green is OK, blue is already, but yellow is rubbish. So I had to make them up.
(Bear) There are paint names...
(Fforde) But no one knows what the paint manufacturer’s names mean. Not even them. It’s like trying to take about maths in words. Or quantum mechanics. Someone explains it to you and you sort of get it, then you look away and it’s gone!
(Bear) Let’s talk about female protagonists. I got the Eyre Affair because I heard about it Radio 4 and they liked it — probably because all the literary stuff made them miss the strong female protagonist! — and I liked it becuas it had a non-glamourous female character and I looked at the author’s name and assumed that "Jasper Fforde" was a pseudonym for a woman.
(Fforde) It’s actually because I taught myself to write. But only in the sense that I didn’t do a course: I just sat down and thought I could be an author because I’d written an OK short story, so I spent years working on my own before being published. So no-one told me what I could and couldn’t do and I didn’t get put in channels by teachers who, however good they are, draw you into their way of thinking. But if you do it on your own, you don’t have that — I used hard graft and ignored every rule to write the sort of book that people just weren’t writing at the time. So I didn’t know there was anything wrong with writing in a female voice, so I just did because I didn’t know any better.
I actually wrote Nursery Crimes first, but I became more interested in the secondary female characters, so I came to Thursday Next. The Eyre Affair was originally written in the third person, but I decided to switch to the first person. Because it was just a search and replace — done in a couple of hours — but it took four months. And if you read it closely, you’ll notice there’s a flashback chapter when Thursday is in hospital and it’s there because of the shift from third to first, and now that you know that you’ll say oh that explains it...
But I think what’s also important is having secondary male characters who are OK with strong females. Which is why I like Landon; because he’s supportive but he’s also his own guy and quite fun. There are good role models for men in there too!
(Bear) You were writing for years before you got published. Is anything else going to appear?
(Fforde) Maybe! Nursery Crimes were written first and my publisher asked me if I had anything else but I had to spend quite a lot of time rewriting them. Which showed me how my writing skills had improved!
(Bear) If you haven’t read The Fourth Bear you really should. Because it’s really very logical...
(Fforde) Yes, it explains why the porridge is at different temperatures even though it was all poured at the same time and why Mummy and Daddy Bear were sleeping in separate beds — marital problems — so there has got to be a fourth bear involved somewhere.
My favourite title is The Woman Who Died a Lot because its just the sort of title a really rubbish mystery writer would come up with, but at the same time it exactly describes the plot...
(Bear) Socialist republic of Wales. Discuss.
Most things have got some sort of little story behind them. I’ve got a very good memory for little details, so a lot fo the non-sense I use is just in my head. People sometimes ask me whether I do lots of research for my books and I don’t, it’s already there.
I’m a big fan of aeroplanes. But most people will die of boredom before we even get to sleeve valves — I can see three audience members have already gone!
So the finale of the Eyre Affair took place on an airship used for TV repeaters — because that’s the sort of thing you’d use them or something like a U2 spy plane for without satellites. And the villain’s hideout was on it and it was rundown, like an ocean liner that was once glamorous but has fallen on hard times, and exciting and fun. At the time I didn’t realise that airships were big in steampunk and when people told me that, I stopped using them.
My wife liked the book — which was very kind of her — and I was talking to her about airships and how they plane they were on to reach it would need to attach with grapples and how, when an airship burnt fuel, it would get lighter, but what if they could condense water from the atmosphere to offset this... but she didn’t like it. So I said, as a throwaway remark — because my wife is Welsh — "oh, in that case, I’ll just set it in the Socialist Republic of Wales instead then..." And it stuck in my mind. And we were going out and she asked me if I was coming and I said, I just have to go and write something first... And it was better than the original by a factor of 20.
(Bear) And the cheese smuggling. That’s come true...
(Fforde) By sheer maths, if you have billions of ideas some of them must come true. So there’s cheese smuggling across the border between Canada and the US, and now there’s smuggling into Russian because of all the stuff in Ukraine.
(Bear) And the Crimean War...
(Fforde) Also the Danish. When I came up with the idea about the government demonising another nation and blaming it for everything, I cast around for the least offence nation in Europe and it was between the Dutch and the Danish. And then suddenly there was all that stuff about the cartoons...
(Bear) What's happening in the going forward? Are we going to see any of the books you’ve already written?
(Fforde) I’m still finishing off the next book. I had the Nursery Crime series before I got pubhsed and I had to spend six months improving then and it's more fun to work on new stuff — so maybe when I'm old and cranky I’ll revisit things. But I’ve got lots of ideas, but no time and there are other things in the way. Photography and flying and monopoly...
(Bear) Finally, which work would you most like to be remembered for?
(Fforde) If I die... today?
(Bear) ...please don’t...
(Fforde) ...today Shades of Grey is the cleverest, but The Fourth Bear might be my choice. But there is the excitement of books that are still to be written, so in five or ten years time, who knows?
(Bear) How would you introduce yourself and your work?
(Fforde) It’s hard to give a quick overview of what Jasper Fforde’s books are about. It’s the Jasper Fforde role playing game: how do you describe them in a couple of words? The answer is to just read the books. Which makes him a publisher’s nightmare: because they can’t just put the tag line "Just read the book" on the cover! It’s mostly absurdist comedy. How did I put it recently? "I’ve supped at the feast of storytelling and made away with the scraps..."
(Bear) You've been accused of being elitist because you have to have read things to get the jokes!
(Fforde) I’m not a fan of elitism. And you don’t really need to know more than that Shakespeare wrote plays and Jane Eyre is a victorian pot-boiler to get most of it. Writing about Jane Eyre, I was aware that people wouldn't know it, so I dropped in a potted précis — the joke being you don't muck around with classic literature. But of course you should! There are spoilers for Jane eyre for people who haven't read it.
(Bear) One noticeable thing is the word play, although sometimes I look at the names and think there must be a joke in there somewhere even if I can’t see it!
(Fforde) I love word play and there's usually a joke in the names. (My favourite puns is "marmalade is the preserve of breakfast” It’s just delightfully rounded!) There’s a long tradition of silly names going all the way back to people like Dickens. Landen Park-Laine is a monopoly joke! The best properties to have were orange and red; so the ones you land on after going to jail are the best because there are multiple ways of getting there. But the purple ones have prestige which is why you have Park-Laine — because you know his parents were well-to-do! (The greatest joy of my life was to beat my older brother at Monopoly. I was eleven!) But the names weren’t changed for the American edition — so he should have been Park-Place, because the U.S. version of monopoly is based on Atlantic City — so the pun didn’t work.
Paige Turner was a stealth pun. It was so groan-worthy that I didn’t feel I could use it, so I either called her page or Miss Turner right up to the very end when — bam! — I finally hit you with the full joke. Stealth. Pun.
Bowden Cable is also pun — it’s the name of the sleeve cable on a brake, invented by Raleigh for their bikes.
(Bear) So, cameras? Why don't you use digital?
(Fforde) It’s about living in a post skill environment. Click and there it is, it's trying to attain a skill and get the results you want and there's something romantic about getting the right result first time, it's like writing the perfect sentence. You don't even need to remember anymore — you just need to know where to look it up. But it's a pointless skill!
(Bear) Children have vast computer skills but they don't know to loose up the answers! Whereas I have almost no skills and I just look it up on Wikipedia... Which has mislead me before... Have you checked your page?
(Fforde) Not recently...
(Bear) I wouldn’t. There’s someone with your name, but he’s nothing like you. But he does claim to have written books with the same titles as yours...
(Fforde) ...I’ll call my lawyer!
[Fforde gets out his camera geeks out about it for a while, taking it to pieces and reasembling it. As he goes to put it away he bumps it on the table] ...and you can use them to knock in tent pegs!
I was a camera and stills assistant. Large and superlarge forms. Now all the super expensive cameras from the old days are dirt cheap on eBay, so I can afford all these things that I never thought I’d own. But the biggest cost is time these days.
(Bear) Spray and hope photography is absurdly expensive.
(Fforde) Which goes back to word usage. Paparazzi aren’t really photographers in a sense. They’re not after something with artistic merit, they just want something that people will pay for. They’re a rough bunch and they have some interesting language. When they’re taking photos of an actress, they talk about "hosing the dolly” because it’s what they do: she comes out and it's click-click-click and they’re hosing the dolly. It’s strange and chilling, but its also very English and it’s exactly what they’re doing...
(Bear) ...and it’s now very cheap with digital...
(Fforde) ... but it’s still expensive in term of access and placement.
(Bear) Who wrote Shakespeare?
(Fforde) I believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare! As you’ll know from the books...
(Bear) Yes, you should all go out and read it...
(Fforde) You don’t need to read it. You just need to buy it!
(Bear) Buy two: one to keep and one to read; because your eyes will wear out the pages...
(Fforde) I’ve found that glasses wear out over time. I have them for a few years and I look through them and after a while I find they’ve worn out and I have to get a new pair...
(Bear) Shakespeare!
(Fforde) The Eyre Affair is mostly jokes about who wrote Shakespeare. All of the various theories appear at some point
[Bear lists some of the theories]
(Fforde) So I believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. But which one: the London or Stratford? Because people say that there is nothing to link the two. Except when the London one talks about the actors he worked with in Stratford. So they’re only completely separate until facts get in the way of the theory.
It’s like the Marlowe thing. People say that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare, except when you point out that he would have had to have written plays after he died.
(From the floor) Marlowe faked his own death!
(Fforde) Yes, stabbed in the eye in a tavern in Deptford in front of 30 witnesses so that he could carry on writing plays as someone else...
(Bear) Deptford has really improved since then! Southwark too. I was put up there not long ago and I thought it would be in a place that charged by the hour but it was actually quite a nice flat.
(Fforde) Why are things called flats when they’re not flat and apartments when they’re together not apart? And mint tea? Don’t ask me for mint tea — there’s no such thing — it’s mint infusion! And Shakespeare? He hasn’t written anything good in years. But if he was alive now he’d be living in LA. Working as a script doctor...
(Bear) When is the next book and which one is it?
(Fforde) I can’t seem to write standalone books. The Eyre Affair, The Last Dragonslayer, Shades of Grey, they were also suppose to be standalone; but their worlds were so large that they became series. And now everyone asks about the their favourite series and when the next book is going to be out. And I have to disappoint them.
The next one is going to be called Early Riser and its set in a world where everyone has always hibernated. I’m kind of claiming it's going to be out in 2016, but I think I’ll be lucky to have a draft done by January. But I’m sticking with the name.
How could I be so stupid, writing in the back of Shades of Grey that there were going to be two sequels!
(Bear) There was such a sheer wonderful number of colour names in it...
(Fforde) ...I had to make some of them up. If our world was dominated colours we’d have slang words for them all. As it is, red is pretty good, green is OK, blue is already, but yellow is rubbish. So I had to make them up.
(Bear) There are paint names...
(Fforde) But no one knows what the paint manufacturer’s names mean. Not even them. It’s like trying to take about maths in words. Or quantum mechanics. Someone explains it to you and you sort of get it, then you look away and it’s gone!
(Bear) Let’s talk about female protagonists. I got the Eyre Affair because I heard about it Radio 4 and they liked it — probably because all the literary stuff made them miss the strong female protagonist! — and I liked it becuas it had a non-glamourous female character and I looked at the author’s name and assumed that "Jasper Fforde" was a pseudonym for a woman.
(Fforde) It’s actually because I taught myself to write. But only in the sense that I didn’t do a course: I just sat down and thought I could be an author because I’d written an OK short story, so I spent years working on my own before being published. So no-one told me what I could and couldn’t do and I didn’t get put in channels by teachers who, however good they are, draw you into their way of thinking. But if you do it on your own, you don’t have that — I used hard graft and ignored every rule to write the sort of book that people just weren’t writing at the time. So I didn’t know there was anything wrong with writing in a female voice, so I just did because I didn’t know any better.
I actually wrote Nursery Crimes first, but I became more interested in the secondary female characters, so I came to Thursday Next. The Eyre Affair was originally written in the third person, but I decided to switch to the first person. Because it was just a search and replace — done in a couple of hours — but it took four months. And if you read it closely, you’ll notice there’s a flashback chapter when Thursday is in hospital and it’s there because of the shift from third to first, and now that you know that you’ll say oh that explains it...
But I think what’s also important is having secondary male characters who are OK with strong females. Which is why I like Landon; because he’s supportive but he’s also his own guy and quite fun. There are good role models for men in there too!
(Bear) You were writing for years before you got published. Is anything else going to appear?
(Fforde) Maybe! Nursery Crimes were written first and my publisher asked me if I had anything else but I had to spend quite a lot of time rewriting them. Which showed me how my writing skills had improved!
(Bear) If you haven’t read The Fourth Bear you really should. Because it’s really very logical...
(Fforde) Yes, it explains why the porridge is at different temperatures even though it was all poured at the same time and why Mummy and Daddy Bear were sleeping in separate beds — marital problems — so there has got to be a fourth bear involved somewhere.
My favourite title is The Woman Who Died a Lot because its just the sort of title a really rubbish mystery writer would come up with, but at the same time it exactly describes the plot...
(Bear) Socialist republic of Wales. Discuss.
Most things have got some sort of little story behind them. I’ve got a very good memory for little details, so a lot fo the non-sense I use is just in my head. People sometimes ask me whether I do lots of research for my books and I don’t, it’s already there.
I’m a big fan of aeroplanes. But most people will die of boredom before we even get to sleeve valves — I can see three audience members have already gone!
So the finale of the Eyre Affair took place on an airship used for TV repeaters — because that’s the sort of thing you’d use them or something like a U2 spy plane for without satellites. And the villain’s hideout was on it and it was rundown, like an ocean liner that was once glamorous but has fallen on hard times, and exciting and fun. At the time I didn’t realise that airships were big in steampunk and when people told me that, I stopped using them.
My wife liked the book — which was very kind of her — and I was talking to her about airships and how they plane they were on to reach it would need to attach with grapples and how, when an airship burnt fuel, it would get lighter, but what if they could condense water from the atmosphere to offset this... but she didn’t like it. So I said, as a throwaway remark — because my wife is Welsh — "oh, in that case, I’ll just set it in the Socialist Republic of Wales instead then..." And it stuck in my mind. And we were going out and she asked me if I was coming and I said, I just have to go and write something first... And it was better than the original by a factor of 20.
(Bear) And the cheese smuggling. That’s come true...
(Fforde) By sheer maths, if you have billions of ideas some of them must come true. So there’s cheese smuggling across the border between Canada and the US, and now there’s smuggling into Russian because of all the stuff in Ukraine.
(Bear) And the Crimean War...
(Fforde) Also the Danish. When I came up with the idea about the government demonising another nation and blaming it for everything, I cast around for the least offence nation in Europe and it was between the Dutch and the Danish. And then suddenly there was all that stuff about the cartoons...
(Bear) What's happening in the going forward? Are we going to see any of the books you’ve already written?
(Fforde) I’m still finishing off the next book. I had the Nursery Crime series before I got pubhsed and I had to spend six months improving then and it's more fun to work on new stuff — so maybe when I'm old and cranky I’ll revisit things. But I’ve got lots of ideas, but no time and there are other things in the way. Photography and flying and monopoly...
(Bear) Finally, which work would you most like to be remembered for?
(Fforde) If I die... today?
(Bear) ...please don’t...
(Fforde) ...today Shades of Grey is the cleverest, but The Fourth Bear might be my choice. But there is the excitement of books that are still to be written, so in five or ten years time, who knows?
