I have a suggestion. There is already a competition for worst first sentences; there is already a competition for worst sex scenes. Can we consider, then, a competition for the honour of the worst first paragraph? The paragraph that is as overwrought as possible, preferably with either a useless framing narrative that will be referred back to partway through the novel, clumsy foreshadowing, or occluded terminology or names with no meaning to the reader.
I have decided to cancel this competition. Jasper Fforde wins. He takes home the prize, which is a solid diamond bust of himself carved from a ruby.
This is a shame, because the rest of the novel is a vast improvement, and anyone who got fed up with this and stopped reading after a few sentences thinks that I disliked the book. But that's ok, because if I had stopped reading after a few sentences, I would have disliked the book. Read on! I mean, it doesn't really work as an allegory or satire; the society is too mechanical and abstract yet recognizable to seem either ridiculous or believable. And the characters are rather flat, especially the main character and his sudden, inconceivable changes. Discerning the structure of his world here is of interest, but not so much as his earlier books, and the revelations are either implied by the structure of the setting or sort of random and meaningless.
At the end, I don't really know how to say it; any particular angle I look at the book doesn't really work for me, and it suffers, even for a Jasper Fforde novel, with a painful surfeit of whimsy. Through all that, I give it a recommendation. All of these flimsy, flawed pieces balance somehow into a teetering, but successful book.
Fff/Fffff
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