Author Jasper Fforde

What sort of a writer is Jasper Fforde who lets Jane Eyre get kidnapped from her own book, introduces cigarettes to Marianne Dashwood, and allows Miss Havisham to drive a racecar? He is the same sort who can manage to set up a world so bizarre that his readers learn hardly to blink at the notion of home dodo-cloning kits and cheese policing departments. Jasper Fforde is the author of the Thursday Next books as well as the Nursery Crime series and he plays with classical literature as eagerly as a five-year-old with a toy crown (if far more masterfully). His books are a remarkable romp through literature and an incredible treat for any avid reader, and in June I got to speak with him about his work: the concepts, the names, the dodos.

Hello, is this Jasper?
Yes, it is.

Hi, this is Keely. How are you?
I’m very well.

It’s morning here so it’s kind of weird to think that it’s the middle of the afternoon for you.
It’s a bit strange, yes.

So, I wanted to start off by asking you about something that I read the other day, which I actually hadn’t known. So apparently you started the Thursday Next series basically from her name.
Yeah, kind of. I actually started the series with writing the first Nursery Crime books, so the first book I ever wrote was The Big Over Easy and the second book was The Fourth Bear. And then I was thinking, “So no one’s publishing these books and they’re rejecting them, actually.” I kind of liked the idea of having not nursery rhyme characters but characters from classical fiction, because in The Fourth Bear I’ve used Dorian Gray in a slightly unusual manner—he turns up as a used car salesman.

Right, right.
But I was taking the character and keeping sort of vaguely within the spirit of the character of the novel of The Picture of Dorian Gray. And I thought, “Well, for my next book I thought, what I’ll do is I’ll actually take that as a starting point. I’ll have Jane Eyre being kidnapped out of Jane Eyre.” And then everything kind of led on from there. Then I thought, “Well it should be a woman, a protagonist, because I’ve been using a bloke for the last two books. Um, let’s give her a name, Thursday Next, and next let’s build up from there.” So sort of half that.

So you said that you wrote the first two Nursery Crime books, like, ten years ago, so—to what degree were they different? Because in the Thursday Next series, there’s kind of this explanation of how those books come about.
Well, that’s quite easy to explain, because I got The Eyre Affair published, and then I wrote Lost in a Good Book and then I did Well of Lost Plots, and I always had a sort of vague thought that the Nursery Crime series would be published. So I thought wouldn’t it be fun if I could actually write into The Well of Lost Plots that Thursday is staying in the back-story of one of my unpublished books, and then if it comes to be published, it would actually work quite well, and if it didn’t get published, it doesn’t matter. So you could read Well of Lost Plots quite happily and never read The Big Over Easy and it wouldn’t matter to you, right? So when I finished with Something Rotten, the fourth Thursday book, I said to my publishers, “Right, I’ve got two ideas, Goldilocks and Humpty-Dumpty, what do you think?” And they went, “Oh, yeah, terrific, go for it!” So then of course I could rewrite it with everything I’ve put into Well of Lost Plots, and it looks as though it’s this sort of seamless connection, but it is. So there’s a bit of sort of this reverse engineering there. But those books were heavily rewritten before publication. So it was quite fun actually, so I could make it all fit, vaguely.

The first of your books I ever read was The Big Over Easy, so then when I started reading the Thursday Next series, when I got to The Well of Lost Plots, I recognized all the references, and I was so excited to see it happen because I knew what it was building up to.
Yeah, so it all sort of, I do like a sort of connectivity between my books. And I think it works really well with Big Over Easy and Well of Lost Plots because the sort of narrative, the kind of idea of it, is the Nursery Crime series are actually kind of a place where the characters can have a vacation. If you want to go on a character exchange program holiday, then you head in towards Nursery Crime series. Now, it’s never actually said. And the characters within Nursery Crime division, they don’t ever mention that, but it’s clearly what’s going on. But that’s where I was actually just having a bit of fun. So there’s kind of a little extra bit there that you get by inserting the two together.

Right. So when you said about liking to have connectivity between all your works, I know that you have the non-Thursday Next novel Shades of Grey coming out next year, so are you going to have maybe write a shoutout in the Thursday Next series?
Yeah, well, it won’t be that obvious, but I’m sure I’ll reference it at some point in a very oblique manner. About something that happens or something that has to happen. Or I’ll leave some hidden little trail within Shades of Grey that’s not abundantly obvious when you read Shades of Grey, but maybe when you connect it with a future Thursday, you’ll go “Oh, I get it, okay.” But I’ll be having fun with it, as usual.

So I know that so much of Thursday Next has to do with what’s really going on behind the scenes of all these classic novels. You read Great Expectations or Sense and Sensibility, and then, what, you get angry at the characters for not doing certain things, and imagine that they’re angry as well?
It’s quite obvious—Wuthering Heights—yeah, I have all these books I want to feature. When I start looking through them I think, well, what can I use from this, where can I mine it? And Wuthering Heights is a great one because there’s an awful lot of anger in it, and I thought, “Well, this one should have a little sort of, like, rage counseling session. That would work out really well here. Because I think if people had talked about their anger a little earlier on in the book, perhaps we wouldn’t have had such a miserable book.” Sometimes it’s quite difficult—I was looking at the Thomas Hardy series and trying to find comedy in them and of course I couldn’t because there isn’t any, and I thought, “Maybe that’s the joke, in fact, is that they used to be really, really funny, but they’ve been mined for comedy—someone’s been stealing all the really good one liners—and now they’ve gone into negative comedy.” There’s a lot of fun, but it’s finding stuff I can use, but perhaps not in the way people are going to expect me to use it. Because new ideas and comedy and humor and that sort of thing—it’s all about trying to wrong-foot people. And the nicest possible way is to say, “No, this is the connection I’m going to make, and it’s not what you think it is.”

And even beyond that, there’s all the anachronisms that you have, like Marianne [Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility] smoking cigarettes behind her house when her mom doesn’t know.
Yeah. I think that’s quite amusing, really, that these people are fairly normal. It humanizes them. It takes them away from the mildly stodgy world in which they live. If they are characters in a play, as I sort of tried to maintain that all these characters are, as soon as you start reading them they start chattering away amongst themselves about this and that. And I think it adds a little extra dimension to the book. But I think [Marianne Dashwood] is a bit like that; I think she is a bit naughty, really a sort of naughty-schoolgirl about her. So, I kind of like it.

Even beyond the characters from different works, there’s also just the way the books project this idea of a different England, a different world circa 1985. I remember I was reading one of your books and I was in England, and I was reading a part that mentioned Will-speak machines [which you pay a coin to hear it recite a Shakespearean soliloquy specific to that machine], and I was like, “Wow, that would be really, really cool if those existed right now.”
It would be, wouldn’t it?

I mean, the Will-speak and the dodo birds. Why did you decide to include dodo birds in this world and over-the-counter cloning kits?
You know, I don’t know really. Thursday Next world I didn’t realize wasn’t our world; it’s not even a parallel world, it’s a very, very sort of strange world. But it’s a very broad canvas. I sort of thought there’s nothing I can’t do here. I had to create a world in which to allow the central idea of the book to take place: Jane Eyre is kidnapped out of Jane Eyre. Now, that can’t happen in our world, that’s just not possible, so I had to re-engineer the world to give credibility to the central thrust of the book, so Jane Eyre can be kidnapped and that’s not impossible—it’s kind of likely, or inevitable, almost. And once I’ve done that and I’ve made that neat I thought, “Well, I’ve got to make this world really weird so that, in fact, Jane Eyre being kidnapped out of Jane Eyre is only mildly strange. It’s just something that happens along with a lot of very odd stuff.” And of course I just thought, “Well, I’ll put any idea I can think of,” and I liked the idea of re-cloning dodos and Neanderthals and all that, and the Crimean War. And before you know it, I’ve sort of come up with a very, very sort of strange, rather likable world, I think, where everything is sort of no less violent but there does seem to be a bit of innocence about it. Perhaps that’s why I’ve set it in the sort of late-eighties, or the mid-eighties, because I think the innocence is almost gone by then, and things were just beginning to go a bit rotten. So, it’s a pleasant world, but I just like adding stuff to make it even more unusual, but as I said the central idea was to actually make, maybe, the kidnapping journey sort of credible.

You set up this whole Special Ops system with the different branches of government in order to make [much of the Thursday Next world] possible, including not only the literary detectives but also a “chronoguard” [which polices time and the timeline] and all these other different branches.
Yeah. While I was writing I thought, “Well, if Jane Eyre is kidnapped out of Jane Eyre, then this is a crime novel quite clearly—it’s a kidnapping, an extortion/kidnapping—and I knew I’d have to have a policing agency that looks after this sort of thing. And I do like the sort of wheezing bureaucracy, I think it’s great fun, and if you work for a sort of wheezing bureaucracy there is a lot of potential for good gags. And when you’re writing fantasy or writing really any fiction, what you’re kind of essentially doing is having a character, they’re at somewhere at the beginning, they have to get somewhere at the end, and you have to construct an obstacle course in between them. And essentially I think most fiction writing is obstacle courses, to stop your character from getting where they need to go. And having the spec-ops division is another obstacle for Thursday to have to work round or in between to try and make the whole thing function. And I think, also, it’s slightly satirical and sometimes quite fun to write, because it’s not only amusing but it also anchors a fictional world in the real world because although Thursday’s world is clearly a made up world it is very recognizable in that you can look at it and think well, actually, some of these elements, although they’re not real, they are what we might do if they were possible. Dodos—okay, they were great fun when the dodo home cloning kits came out, but after a while people got bored, they escaped into the wild and they started breeding, and then you had to shoot them. Which is what I think would probably happen if we were to bring dodos back from extinction.

I imagine if you were to bring anything back, that’s what would happen, because everyone would be so frantic at the novelty of it and then all the sudden they’d be everywhere.
They’d soon get bored. You know, humans are incredibly faddy: we just get onto something and we stick with it until something new comes along. As I said, it just anchors the Thursday world—the Nextian universe, as I call it. It just makes it so recognizable. It is here, but it’s not here-here.

And there are other ways in which aspects of the books look frankly at the way things are in our world and are kind of commentary on it. Like the character Millon Defloss, Thursday’s official stalker and biographer, whom she also befriends, and the way that he explains the whole stalking system—I just thought it was a really interesting take on celebrity today.
Absolutely, because you can be a celebrity for anything. And if you can be a celebrity for anything, then why shouldn’t you be a celebrity stalker? And then of course celebrity stalkers would have their own stalkers, and they would have their own stalkers, and ad infinitum. Yeah, it’s a comment on celebrity, absolutely. I think it’s fun to write this sort of stuff because, first, it’s amusing, and secondly, hopefully it’s thought-provoking. And it just shows the ridiculousness of the world that we live in. It’s ridiculous in Thursday’s world, but it’s just as crazy out here. If you were to look at the Nextian universe and ours, and think, “Well, which is the madder?” you’d go, “Uh, don’t know.” You really wouldn’t. It would be a very hard test to tell: “Which is the dafter?” I think ours would probably win hands down.

I also wanted to talk about the Hades family in the Thursday Next books. Basically, they’re the villains of the series, and they’re very interesting because to Thursday they’re not fictional but they’re something completely apart from everything in that world at the same time.
They’re very demonic—special powers. Well, I thought, “In a world in which time travel exists, pretty much anything can happen.” And I know it’s not fully explained how the Hades family can do what they do, whether it’s walking through walls or not being seen on DV cameras or even manipulating coincidences or getting into a memory. It’s never explained at all, and I don’t think it’s really necessary to do so, but I think in Thursday’s world this sort of thing is allowable. But I kind of try and reserve the horror part of the book with the Hades family, where you have all these wicked demonic attributes, and of course Spike. Spike is generally my horror interlude, usually on chapter 17. And between Hades and Spike, they take care of all of the completely sort of impossible things like that. I would think that, in that sort of fantasy/horror, if I just have them then it doesn’t spread over the rest of the book and become too dominating. The time travel is just to do with her father—that’s all he does—and when you’re away from that, there’s no time travel. You’re away from the Hades family and Spike, you’re away from the horror. You’re away from Landon, you’re away from the romance. So all of these various genres in my book, because it’s a multi-genre book, all have sort of these places, and they don’t tend to drift across one another’s territory too much. If I’m in this chapter, okay, I’m in the horror genre, if I’m in this chapter, I’m in the crime genre. I like to mix and match, always, as much as anyone, but I do realize there are limitations to what you can do. Within Thursday and the book world, I try and merge the genres even more—I think I mixed western and sci-fi at the beginning of Something Rotten, I think—and that kind of works in a bizarre, jarring, strange way. It’s a bit of a juggling act, like all writing.

Yeah, it’s kind of like a literary melting pot. I could see it being constructed in the actual Well of Lost Plots—you know, a pinch of this plot, a pinch of that plot, tossing all these ingredients together, and it works. And the Well of Lost Plots itself in general is a very intriguing place, because you get to see how, in Jurisfiction, all these books are assembled, which I thought was really interesting.
What I realized was The Eyre Affair was a sort of stand alone book and there was no book world in The Eyre Affair. As far as anyone was concerned, you just got into books using the prose-portal and there was no other way in and there was no Jurisfiction, there was no nothing. But once I’d written it and they said they wanted a follow-up, I thought, "Well, they probably just want the same thing, just with another classic. Well, no, I’m not going to do that, I’m going to expand. I’m going to develop this world and see what comes out." So I said, "Right, okay, let’s have a book world. Let’s have Jurisfiction. Let’s have everything in place to have a lot of fun moving between books, because I don’t want to get stuck with one particular book." And as soon as I started doing that, I thought, "This idea is actually quite large—there’s tons of stuff I can mine here." Because I realized quite early on that I could have fun not with the individual books or the genres but the method in which stories are told and all the different tricks that writers actually use in their trade. The last original idea, grammasites [parasites that feed off of and thereby ruin the grammar of a book], the mispeling virus—there’s a huge amount there. Anything, a spelling mistake, why Americans don’t use the u in color, we use it all as some sort of gag and all of a sudden there’s a huge, huge vista of potential ideas opened up in front of me. And if I wrote nothing but Thursday books, I could quite happily write until the end of my life and never get to the end of potential for ideas within Thursday books because they’re telling stories about stories and there are so many stories and they can be told in so many different ways that there’s almost no limit to what I can do. So it’s a very rich canvas because not only do we have the Nextian universe or Thursday’s real world, which is kind of weird, but then you have the other world within Thursday’s world, which is the book world. And that has a different set of rules, and different things happen there, but it’s very, very separate. And then, of course, whenever Thursday goes inside a book inside the book world, she’s in a world inside a world, which is inside a world, and we’re looking at that world through the pages of the book. Which goes really more towards saying how remarkable readers are that we can actually hold this in our heads and totally figure it out and there’s not too much difficulty, which is probably what surprised me the most. I can think this stuff up, but if no one can read it and accept it, then it’s worthless. But the very fact that I can make worlds inside worlds inside worlds and everyone goes, “Yeah, I can buy into this, yeah, no problem,” is—to me—nothing short of a miracle, really, and I’m much grateful because of it.

Yeah, in one of the books you even have this part that very much acknowledges the role that readers play. Thursday is training her two other Thursdays [which exist in Jurisfiction as the main characters of fictionalized stories about her], and she gets trapped inside a book and there’s a reader coming, and it ends up being this super reader who’s reading really, really fast, but really, really detailed, and so they are read, which is like the ultimate no-no in jurisfiction.
Seriously, very embarrassing, you have to buy all the drinks at the bar at the end of the day. But I like the idea; it adds a new dimension to the whole reading process, whether when you read a book you take something out of it—like whether you can actually wear down a book. And I just love the idea that every time you read a book you actually corrode the book slightly, and then the books have to go back in to be totally refit every million or so readings. And then of course you can add a bit of jeopardy into the whole series by saying, “What if there’s these people who, when they read the book, understand it so well that they can actually strip all the meaning out of it in five or six readings?” and that can be a major deal. So I was starting out about the plots trade in First Among Sequels, which we have yet to fully develop, but there’s good potential for some good gags there.

Right. I have to say, especially when it comes to the idea of how reading works, it reminds me a lot of this other book that I read when I was—maybe seven years ago, when I was little, called The Great Good Thing. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s about the characters in a book, and it’s about them behind the scenes, but it also shows what happens when the book is read, but the way it’s laid out, they basically have to act out the story each time the book is read, or they have to reassemble at the correct parts. So it’s kind of just beginning to hint at the ideas which you end up rediscovering and developing in your Thursday Next series.
Yeah. I haven’t heard of it, I must say.

It’s a very nice book—more of a kid’s book than anything, but it’s very sweet. But there’s just so much that you can do with that. You can go endlessly into the writer’s world or into the reader’s world just from Jurisfiction. Speaking of which, I really like that you chose the Cheshire Cat as kind of the guardian of Jurisfiction; how did that happen?
Well, Alice in Wonderland is always a firm favorite. It’s the first book I can remember actually choosing to read. When you learn to read and have the choice over what to read, it’s a major moment in your life, I think. I went to my parents’ library, and there were mostly very boring books, but one of them was Alice in Wonderland, so I picked that up and I went away and read it, and then of course I read it two or three times. The books you read when you’re young, and the ones you enjoy, they really stay with you forever. I could read a book now which is much better than some of the books I read when I was sixteen, but it will never stay with me. The best friends you have are the ones you have when you’re fifteen, and it’s the same with books. The best book you ever read was the one you read when you were young, and, certainly, the sorts of books that stay with me and the ones that you see most featured in the books are obviously the ones I feel the most strongly about—with the possible exception of The Little Prince and To Kill a Mockingbird, which don’t feature that much because I didn’t know what to do with them or felt that they were probably too good for me to muck around with them. So it was really that. And I knew the Cheshire Cat so well that I could very easily write his dialogue, because he speaks in this very non sequitur kind of way. And I always wanted to know—in Alice in Wonderland he asks Alice, “What did the baby turn into?” and she says, “It turned into a pig”—which it did. And then the Cheshire Cat comes back again and he says, “Did you say pig or fig?” And this always struck me as the most fantastically good piece of humor because it’s such a good non sequitur, it just doesn’t belong in a children’s book; this is real high comedy. And of course I had the chance, then, to write the other side of the conversation where Thursday is there and they’re arguing over whether it turned into a pig or a fig or a wig or whatever. And we actually reprised that gag a couple of times where he gets it wrong. So if he went to talk to Thursday and then he came back and he gave the answer to Alice—because he was checking up—he wanted to get it straight. And this was my homage to Lewis Carroll, because I was taking his work and Thursday was changing the content of his book. Before Thursday arrived on the scene, there was no “Did you say fig or pig?” He never needed to ask it. So if you read Alice in Wonderland prior to 2000, when The Eyre Affair came out, it would actually read quite differently. That’s the ultimate great gag that I really enjoy writing. It’s kind of clever and subtle and means a lot to me, and anyone else who picks up on that goes “Oh my God, I always wanted to know that.” It’s the kind of thing I like that I think is enjoyable and gives me a good feeling.

And you did that in the first book with Jane Eyre, too, where you decide to provide an explanation for the disembodied voice crying “Jane, Jane!” outside her window.
Yeah, what was that all about? A lot of critics—it’s one of the real odd points inside the book. You know, everything’s all normal and then all of the sudden there’s this sort of rather clumsy Victorian almost-spiritualism pops into it, and you go, “What? That’s ridiculous.” So I wanted to explain that away. And of course, now, whenever I ask Jane Eyre scholars—of which I meet quite a few, and thankfully they’ve all been very proud of The Eyre Affair—I say to them, “Well, how do you explain that?” and they go “Ugh, don’t know, but you’ve got the best explanation. Whenever I read it now, I just think of Thursday hiding behind the window.” And I say, “Yeah, it does make more sense that way, doesn’t it?” and they say “Yeah.” So it ties into that whole change in the ending, the fact that, when we begin The Eyre Affair, Jane Eyre has a really bad ending that no one likes. She goes off to India! I mean, rubbish ending. So that whole section with Thursday changing the ending for the better is—again, it’s like the Cheshire Cat idea. It’s one that I really like because there’s evidence of what Thursday did within the book and all you have to do is look, because you never knew before and now you read The Eyre Affair and it’s obvious. You know, you first explain engineering, which I like doing, and it just makes the Thursday books seem that more real. Because, yeah, of course she was there, because there she was. It doesn’t make sense in the book and the ending is much better.

And it kind of gives her a place, like she now has not only a role in the Thursday Next series but in all these other books. Basically, if something happens that is odd or a non sequitur or unexplained the new de facto answer is Thursday did it.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Thursday did it. And sometimes it doesn’t work out very well, and Thornfield Hall was burnt to the ground and Bertha Rochester died in the fire, but she died a hero’s death, and you can sort of re-explain all the stuff. You know, Thursday was there in the fire with Rochester dealing with Acheron [Hades, a member of the aforementioned Hades Family] once and for all. So it all kind of works out in the end. It’s all a bit of fun, really, isn’t it? That’s what writing’s all about, really, I suppose, unless you’re Thomas Hardy, of course, then it’s sometimes a bit of fun.

So, you’re British so you’re writing all of this from a very British perspective. I have to wonder, if Thursday Next ended up mucking about in American literature, what would be true in America and in this world that’s not true in England or vice versa?
Well, I must say, the people I speak to in the States have absolutely no problems with it at all, and when I suggest what great American books you’d like to do, and they say, “Well, you’ve already covered The Raven and The Wreck of the Hesperus.” And I haven’t done Huckleberry Finn, and I’ve still got to do [The Legend of] Sleepy Hollow, which would be a great one to do. But I think the tops about these is that I don’t think Shakespeare is British any longer, I don’t think Charles Dickens is British any longer, any more than Charlotte Bronte is British anymore, or Jane Austen, for that matter, because they have traveled all the way around the globe and they’re in every single language, and I think they belong to a sort of shared heritage that belongs to us all. And for that reason, I don’t think people feel really—from what I understand, talking to people, they don’t feel as though I should be doing more American-style books or anything like that. If people are decently well-read—and I always assume that if you read my books then you clearly read books, because people have said to me, “Well, isn’t this a bit elitist, I mean, you’re assuming people read books,” and I go, “Well, if you don’t read books, you’re not going to read mine, are you?” so they go, “Oh, yes, of course that’s right, isn’t it?” So I’ve assumed, and I think quite rightly, that anyone who reads [my books], reads, and anyone who doesn’t read, doesn’t read [my books]. I’m actually going to the audience who reads, and then I’m okay, because anyone who reads will know who William Shakespeare is, and Dickens, and Jane Eyre and Charlotte Bronte and Austen. They’ll have a vague idea who they are even if they haven’t read them. I must say, I’m not particularly worried about it at all.

Right. I’m not saying that I wish you’d go in a more American direction—don’t change what you’re doing, because it’s working. It kind of makes one want to continue the world on in their head and wonder what it would be like if you carried that world on into such and such a place or such and such a scenario, and it’s the type of world that really lends itself to that, too.
Yeah. I’m using The Scarlet Letter as well. That’s one of your guys, isn’t it?

Who?
The Scarlet Letter.

Yeah, yeah, Hawthorne, yes.
That’s one of your guys.

Yes, he is.
I take from anywhere, really, as long as they’re in sort of western culture, which is what I understand. I’m not going to attempt anything I don’t particularly understand. You know, it’s all fair game. All it has to be is kind of alive in people’s imagination, and people have to have heard of them for it to have any kind of resonance or relevance. But anything’s fair game.

And, in the way that it’s set up, I’m sure that you’ve had this discussion before with other people, but I know that you come from a movie background, as well. And I know that you’re currently refusing to sell the film rights to The Eyre Affair, which I think makes sense because it’s so based in—so thoroughly entrenched in its own status as a book that it’s kind of hard to see how that would work on film.
Yeah, I think it’s a text-based story. Books about stories and stories about books. I’m fairly jaundiced about the whole thinking that the natural progression of a book is to be made into a movie, and I’m not sure I really buy into that, but that is sort of the indicator here, the litmus test of whether a book is successful, is whether there’s a movie made of it. The possibility of a bad movie will be made of it is very high, because it’s that kind of book, it’s a difficult one, you’d have to take a lot out, and producers being what they are, obviously they’ve got to maximize their return for the minimum amount of investment. I don’t think the subject matter would survive a producer’s hands, to be honest. So, until such time, if it’s so fantastically successful and popular that I can call the shots, I’m not giving up the ropes.

And you know, there are also things that wouldn’t really translate to film in the same way, like the footnoterphone, in that the entire footnoterphone system would lose something if it went to film.
Yeah, it would. I’m sure we could make up some other way it could work. I mean, there’s always ways around things. I think I could make it into a very watchable film, quite; whether it would have the appeal that would justify the budget that it would have to have, I don’t know. But it could be done. You know, it could all be done. But I think the right format with it is not film—but maybe four one-hours for television could work. Or more. And then you could really get into the characters and then it wouldn’t matter if it had too many special effects.

Right. And I have to say, even though it could work or it couldn’t work, it works so well as what it is it doesn’t need to be anything else. But at the same time it’s interesting to think what the concept of literature behind the scenes of all these great books would be like if it were applied to movies and you’ve got a setup where there’s—what characters in separate movies do when they’re not being captured by a camera.
Oh, yeah, well I’m sure someone will make that movie at some point. Steve Martin kind of vaguely had a go with Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid in which he used sort of perceptions of black and white movies and had his own story plodding along behind. And it would be great fun to do, but that wouldn’t be a sort of film version of my books, that would be a different idea entirely, and I’m fully expecting someone to come up with that idea. They’ll take Casablanca and then they’ll have the story that’s behind it, and you’ll see the back of Bogart’s head while the scene is going on and then behind the scenes something else is going on. So—I think it’ll happen, but you have to do it to a film which was known really well in order to have real resonance.

Right, but also the concept has been touched on by other movies—for example, my favorite is Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which takes that concept and is very involved with it, but that mostly focuses on the animated world and on original characters so it would be interesting to see if that concept were to be applied to movies that everybody knows and loves.
Yeah. Oh, it could. It could very easily, I’m sure, but if it works it works. If you can get a good writer and director you could make a project like that sustain without it being merely tricking. But it’s all there. You just have to have to skill to pull it off.

Right. So closer to the beginning of the interview we briefly discussed your upcoming book Shades of Gray and I was wondering if you could talk about that more.
It’s a pleasure for me because it’s not about other people’s characters, it’s about my own characters, so from that point of view it’s remarkable, in fact, because I’ve written two other books which aren’t published which are [exclusively] my own characters, and like all of my books it’s not easy to explain. It’s set in a future world where something happens, we’re not sure what. The characters live in a very depopulated British isle in which history is history because there’s no need for it and everybody seems gratuitously incurious about the past and all discrimination has been banished forever. And there’s no discrimination of anything, not even stupidity; in fact, stupid people can get to become leaders of the community very easily because the hierarchy—obviously whoever engineered this entire plan has decided that humans need a hierarchy, but not one that’s based on ambition and greed, but actually based on the colors that you see. So if you can see purple, and purple only, then you go to the top of the pile, but if you see red you go to the bottom of the pile, and if you can’t see any colors at all, then you’re essentially a sort of worker bee of the collective. And that is essentially the framework of the system. And it’s about two characters within this system who start thinking that perhaps this system isn’t the best system, and that there might have been another system in the past, and set out to maybe do something about it. So it’s a kind of—well, I don’t know what you would call it really. It’s a kind of off concept.

That almost makes me think of The Giver, actually, because The Giver—well, it’s not based on color, but about halfway through the book you learn that the entire world is lived without color but nobody realizes it because nobody’s ever known color.
Oh, no, they realize it though. Say you’re a blue and you can’t see any color but blue—you can actually see synthetic red. You can actually see one of two shades of synthetic red. And that synthetic red is in fact supplied to you by the nation as a whole to make your life more exciting and fun and everything, whether it’s enjoyment or medicine or whatever is supplied to you through color, so a specific color will actually have a physical change within your body, and you’d get drunk not on alcohol but on a specific shade of green. So if you were totally out of your head on green you’d be saturated and you’d have to look at some red to sober up. So there’s all kinds of possibilities and it’s funny because the sentence doesn’t really work very well but it’s based around color and this sort of future dystopia. 1984 meets South Pacific meets Des Capital meets Dead Poets Society. I don’t know, it’s a strange mix, but all the characters are my own and it’s great fun. But I’ve yet to finish it in fact.

Well, I mean, when I brought up The Giver I imagine that the characters of Shades of Grey wouldn’t be completely unaware of color if there was a hierarchy built around it. So, for example, do the people who see red control the supply of red?
They’d like to think they do. Well, they do in a certain way because, although they’re quite low down on the chromatic scale, they’re the only ones who can see red, so they’re the only ones who can find red. Because to get red pigment to see, you have to collect scrap red that has been left behind, and of course if you’re high percentage red then you can find scrap red and you’re immensely useful to your community. If you can only see a low amount then you’re less useful because within each band it’s not a question of “Well, yes, I can see red,” it’s “How much can you see?” “Okay, well, I can see about 50% red.” “Oh, well, that’s not very high.” That’s the medium percent to see, but 80%, that’s very high and that’s very useful. So it’s creating a huge new obstacle for people to work around and that’s what I find exciting about writing fantasy worlds, is creating a very strange place and peopling it with characters who want to do very strange things but can’t because of barriers. So I’ve taken away the discriminatory barriers that we might have in our world and I’ve replaced them with other ones and then we’re gonna see how the whole situation works out. And ultimately there won’t be much difference.

Well, right. Would it be possible, for example, for a person to see both red and blue naturally or is that not something that would happen?
Well, it would be a purple then. If you are a yellow and you marry a blue then you would have a child who could see green.

Well, can you only see green or can you see blue on its own?
Well you can see a bit of yellow and a bit of blue, but the amount you can see is not as strong as if you were a yellow, for instance.

Right, because mainly you see green so that’s what you see first and foremost.
Right. So if you can see 75% red, and then you looked at a purple, something that was naturally purple, you’d see the red component of the purple. So all kinds of interesting ideas.

Yeah, this is definitely the first book that’s going to be coming from you that’s completely a departure from the Thursday series so I think it’s going to be really interesting to see how that plays out.
Yeah, very exciting, I must say. Yeah, I don’t want to drop the ball, but if you don’t experiment and don’t stretch yourself then you wind up doing the same old stuff every year and I don’t want to do that. Because with writing you’re constantly learning your craft all the time, you never learn it all; you’re constantly, constantly learning. Because the book shows the skills that I learned in this particular book, then obviously I can use it on future Thursday books, which means that future Thursday books and other books will hopefully get a little better with a little bit of pathos in them. So it’s just an ongoing, improving situation and any advice to any author that they should give to themselves is to write better books. That’s what all authors should be doing: writing better books.

Right. Right, yeah, especially because—it’s a bit unfortunate—because reading has just been declining lately.
Has it?

Well, I mean it has in Americas.
Because here in the UK more people have been reading now than ever before.

Ah, well, here in America more people are watching TV more than ever before.
Really? Well, a lot of people are watching TV but “Are we losing readers to TV?” is the question. I mean, here we’re having book clubs and more people are joining book clubs and people are finding book clubs better than therapy.

Well, that might be happening to some people here, but the thing about the US is that we are so much a culture revolves around media, like partly the internet but mostly the TV and movies and celebrity, so books kind of get left by the wayside.
Yeah. Well, maybe the people who I talk to—people who come and listen to me, the people who I talk to, the people who read, tend to regard the media as laughable.

Well, it is!
And one of the things I’ve learned being an author is that, yes, you can be in two camps. You can be someone who is an avid TV watcher and an avid reader as well, but in general you seem to be one or the other, and the sort of more informed, the slightly more switched on, are reading fiction and are taking the media with a pinch of salt and perhaps understand things and people and life just a bit better. And I’m glad to see—I don’t know about the States, but over here, where TV has become worse and worse on an ever increasing sliding scale—I think people are in fact are looking for more and better forms of entertainment and there’s more talk radio we have at the moment and more books being read which can only be applauded. I must say it’s a jolly good direction in which to go. Less TV and more books, that’s what we want to have.

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