Jasper Fforde

To fail spectacularly is a loser’s paradise.

“You’ll forgive me for saying this,” said Webastow, looking over his glasses, “but this is the most harebrained piece of unadulterated stupidity that any government has ever undertaken anywhere.”

“Thank you very much,” replied Ms. Yogert courteously. “I’ll make sure your compliments are forwarded to Prime Minister van de Post.”

Sprockett buzzed briefly to himself. “Does that sort of thing happen out there in the RealWorld, or is it just in books?”

I thought for a moment. Of the untidy chaos I had seen in the RealWorld; of not knowing what was going to happen; of not knowing what, if anything, head relevance. The RealWorld was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor. I thought then of the narrative order here in the BookWorld, our resolved plot lines and the observance of natural justice we took for granted.

“Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld hope their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.”

“Why didn’t he say so directly?” asked Sprockett, not unreasonably.

“This is Fiction,” I explained. “The exigency of drama requires events to be clouded in ambiguity.”

“Bipedal movement is the skill of controlled falling,” said Square. “If it weren’t so commonplace, it would seem miraculous—like much out here, to be truthful.”

“Dead,” muttered Mycroft with a resigned air. “Never been that before. Not even once. Are you quite sure?”

Whatever. As far as I can see, there is one state of dead and that’s ‘not living.’ Now, do you have anything useful to add to this investigation or not?”

No one had been more surprised than me by the arrival of the Great Panjandrum when I pulled the emergency handle. For the nonbelievers it was something of a shock, but not any less than for the faithful. She had been so long a figure of speech that seeing her in the flesh was something of a shock. I thought she had seemed quite plain and in her midthirties, but Humpty-Dumpty told me later he had been shaped like an egg. In any event, the marble statue that now stands in the lobby of the Council of Genres depicts the Great Panjandrum as Mr. Price the stonemason saw him—with a leather apron and carrying a mallet and stone chisel.

If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction—and ultimately, without a major resolution.

“Oh!” said Landen, reading a letter. “A rejection from my publisher. They didn’t think Fatal Parachuting Mistakes and How to Avoid Making Them Again was what they had in mind for self-help.”

“I guess their target audience doesn’t include dead people.”

“You could be right.”

“I am surprised to see you because…you died six years ago!”

“I did?” inquired Mycroft with genuine concern. “Why does no one tell me these things?”

I shrugged, as there was really no good answer to this.

“What’s in Hangar One at the moment?” I asked the driver.

“The Magus.”

“Still?” Even the biggest refit never took more than a week, and John Fowles’s labyrinthine-plotted masterpiece had been in there nearly five.

“It’s taking longer than we thought—they removed all the plot elements for cleaning, and no one can remember how they go back together again.”

“I’m not sure it will make a difference,” I murmured as we pulled up outside Hangar Eight.