DARK READING MATTER

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Fourteen years (how has it been that long?) after The Woman Who Died a Lot, Thursday Next returns in Jasper Fforde's final, and most metafictional, novel about the literary detective. Beginning with the title, Dark Reading Matter, which shares the initials with "Digital Rights Management," and an introduction which orders the reader to read certain passages out loud, Fforde telegraphs that he has pulled out all the stops for Thursday Next's swan song.

The DRM is a region where forgotten fiction lives, not just books that were published and disappeared, but also drafts which were rejected or never even finished. Moving between the real world and DRM, or even between the BookWorld and the DRM, is a difficult activity, but one which Thursday believes she must accomplish in order to resolve the challenges that face her in the novel that she knows will be her final adventure, along with the knowledge that irrevocable death in the last book is a distinct possibility.

Any and all fictional tropes are fodder for Fforde's mill. he existence of a multiverse (and the DRM) means that characters who have died can be brought back to vex Thursday Next, or perhaps help her if they are alternative versions of the characters we have previously met. Stories we know can be re-written, resulting in a great Martian trilogy written by H.G. Wells, which is being re-written within the confines of Fforde's world with dire consequences, not only for the characters of that book, but other books as well.

Forde digs back throughout the previous volumes, returning to the popularity of Shakespeare with Shakespearean theme parks, and the fringe Baconists, who are now seen as a threatening political force. Their rise allows Fforde to take aim at current fringe politics in a general way. Fforde's look at politics, however, is only part of his linking Thursdays Next's BookWorld with the real world in which we live. He introduces an important character to the book to explore ways in which literature in our own world is changing.

Throughout the book, footnotes and the characters refer to Fforde's other novels and Fforde's own inability to complete the book (or the delay in writing Red Side Story). Fforde-the-character's presumed writer's block becomes an important plot point, especially paired with the idea of an engine which can write novels for authors in a direct challenge to the idea of authors using generative AI to complete their works. Although Thursday is mortified by the prospect, Fforde-the-character looks at the prospect from a variety of points of view.

The first seven Thursday Next novels were published during a decade-long span, from 2002 through 2012. The last Thursday Next (a phrase that seems oxymoronic without context) novel doesn't exactly wrap up loose ends left by the prior books, but it does provide the reader with a conclusion even as Thursday and Landon Next prepare for the next stage of their lives, drawing on not only has occurred in the previous books, but also on the unpublished versions of their world revealed in the DRM. The conclusion of the Thursday Next series in 2026, the completion of The Last Dragonslayer series in 2022, and the short lived Nursery Crimes series, and the stand alone novels Early Riser and The Constant Rabbit means Fforde's only unfinished series in Shades of Grey, so Fforde's fans know there is more Fforde to look forward to.

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