Not quite right

I probably haven't said so in so many words before but I often to like to think that there's a parallel universe where I grew up next door to Jasper Fforde. At seven we would have promised solemnly to marry each other when we grew up. In primary school I would have instructed him carefully in the right way to play "Mothers and Fathers" and he would have let me help stage motor cross rallies with his matchbox cars. We would have listened to The Goon Show on ABC AM on Saturday afternoons, giggled at The Two Ronnies on Friday nights and hidden under the couch during Dr Who. We would have discovered PG Wodeghouse and Jerome K Jerome together but probably one of us would have introduced the other to Jane Austen and Kurt Vonnegut.

Of course, in high school we wouldn't have been seen dead together and would have ostentatiously ignored each other on the bus home but in second semester of first year of uni he would have run into me in the queue at the undergraduate library. He would be wearring the most deplorable acid wash jeans and a chambray shirt that his mum had bought but we would have realised we both adored Red Dwarf and we'd have picked up where we'd left off six years earlier. For the next decade, I would try to set him up with any single women I knew: "He's really funny. You've just got to get past the bad clothes and hair." Eventually, of course, he would have found someone utterly perfect and completely unlike me and got married and on the day of the ceremony my heart would have quivered ever so slightly because things would never be the same between us again.* I mean, where else was I going to another male friend who read the Brontes voluntarily? And who else would have come up with something as delightfully absurd as Jurisfiction? And why can't we all have home gene-splicing kits so people can have pet dodos?

This background explains my shock when I got to page 60 of Thursday Next's latest adventure First Among Sequels where she says:

"Since I'm an Outlander I have powers of abstract and long-term thought that most fictioneers can only dream about. The thing is I don't generally tow the line, and Jobsworth doesn't like that."

Oh Jasper!

Luckily, this is about the only thing I can complain about. The book's an utter delight otherwise, a comic tour de force of sci-fi and literary in-jokes coated in whimsy, puns and metaphors streched to the point of absurdity.

I like the Thursday Next series better than Fforde's two Jack Spratt books, not least because she's such an attractive heroine. In this adventure, she's something of a rarity in popular fiction - at least as written by a bloke: a 52-year-old female action hero with an active sex life. Good on you, Jasper.

*Any resemblance between this fantasy and the plot of My Best Friend's Wedding are acknowledged but purely coincidental.