Book Review: First Among Sequels

Taking a short break from the "Religion in Cerebus" series, I recently read my first Thursday Next book by Jasper Fforde -- who I had never heard of until recently. I wrote a review, but found that the book editor of the Post-Dispatch isn't interested. So I thought I'd post it here.

This is either the fifth, the sixth, or the first book to feature Thursday Next, depending on how you're counting.

Those who have read the first four will no doubt consider it the fifth, but there's a book they won't be familiar with on the list of previous Thursday Next books in the front, The Samuel Pepys Affair, which has a line through it and a notation that it is no longer available.

Moreover, this book claims to be the first one featuring the *real* Thursday, not the highly fictionalized one suitable for action/adventure yarns more-or-less invented for the previous books. That Thursday is also a character here, along with the Thursday Next from the unavailable fifth book. If that's not enough duplication, there are the Danver clones -- multiple copies of the austere housekeeper from Rebecca.

It's difficult to describe the Thursday Next novels to someone unfamiliar with them. They take place in an alternate universe -- but then, what book doesn't? You can't possibly meet the real Rabbit Angstrom, after all. He doesn't exist. So a world where he *does* exist, however much like our own it may be, must be an alternate universe.

Fforde takes this idea and plays it to the hilt. There is a whole universe of universes, a vast Bookspace in which whole universes made of books float, mingling in groups of related genres. Thursday can go between the "real" world (well, it's real to her) and the book worlds, and does so in her job as an agent for Jurisfiction.

Thursday's real world is obviously not ours -- genetic engineering has brought back the dodo, for instance. But the differences often make hilarious comment on our own real world.

For instance, the book opens with the news of a hotly contested political debate about the stupidity surplus.

"The reason for the crisis was clear: Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste and his ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties with a reckless degree of responsibility that bordered on inspired sagacity. Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance."

The problem with this is that sooner or later, the stupidity is going to have to come out. Instead of being a little bit stupid more or less all the time, the government was building up a surplus that could only be expended by something monumentally dumb. "Only a blunder of staggering proportions would remove the surplus, and the nature of this mind-numbing act of idiocy was a matter of considerable speculation."

There's also the ChronoGuard, a sort of time travel police, an organization Thursday's son, Friday, is destined to grow up to be head of, except that it's three years since he was supposed to have joined and he shows no signs of interest in it whatsoever.

Fforde's stories are so full of literary in-jokes that even though I'm fairly well read I'm sure I missed half of them. Witty, charming, funny, exciting, puzzling, imaginative and rollicking good fun, this book is a delight even if you've never read any of the others. I know this because it was my own introduction to the series, and I can't wait to go find the others.

First Among Sequels
By Jasper Fforde
Viking, 366 pages, $24.95

Religion in Cerebus - Mothers and Daughters - Part Three

I'm going to go through each book in M&D one at a time, but I'm not going to restrict myself to things in that book. I may speak of something Po tells Cerebus, for instance, and then compare it to similar or contradictory bits from the other books, and when I get to Reads and Minds I'll be hearkening back to the first two books. So although I'll be using the structure of M&D itself to some extent, I will very much be discussing M&D as a whole throughout.

While most of what I have to say about Flight revolves around Po's extended chat with Cerebus over their chess game, I would be remiss in ignoring completely the last bit of evidence that Cerebus fulfills some long-ago prophecy as the "redeemer" of Iest. On page 30 of Flight, a character we'll soon learn is named Bryan spots Cerebus killing Cirinists outside and points it out to his wife, who doesn't believe him at first, until she sees Cerebus for herself.

"He's killing all the Cirinists," says Bryan. "He's been resurrected -- that's what! By Tarim! And he's come back to redeem Iest! Just like the prophecies said."

(emphasis in original)

Now, on the one hand it would be hard to find a much more explicit comparison to Christ than to claim a character had been "resurrected" and was sent back by God (whom the Iestians identify as "Tarim" to "redeem" Iest. But the redemption here isn't at all a Christian redemption. Is much more like the kind of "redemption" that the Jews of Jesus' day who believed in the messiah were generally looking for, which Jesus definitely did not provide: someone who would rout the Romans and set up a Kingdom of God with its seat in Jerusalem. To the extent that Cerebus is seen by people as a "redeemer" in Cerebus, this is what they mean. No one is looking for him to redeem their soul, to help the in the afterlife. They are all looking for redemption in the here and now, and it generally means vengeance and glory and a return to power for downtrodden people who remember or imagine better days.

Did Dave not understand the Christian concept of the redeemer? Did he understand it but, like the people of Jesus' day who had something else in mind, reject it? I don't know, but there seems to be no doubt that an explicit Cerebus/Christ analogy is being made here, but with a definition of "redeemer" that is seriously at odds with the Christian one. I think that's important, because to the extent that Cerebus ever fulfills the prophecy, it is definitely this earlier, more violent vision of redemption he embodies.

Of course, Cerebus can't defeat the hordes of Cirinists by himself. He rallies the people to his cause -- or rather the men. And those of them within the sound of his voice obey him, and are slaughtered. Then he disappears.

It takes a while, including a number of encounters with fake Pos -- including, apparently, the one he met during "Mind Games II" -- but eventually, this leads to Cerebus encountering the real Suenteus Po. Or one of them, anyway. The primary Suenteus Po, if you will, though he is neither the first of that name nor, as it turns out, the one whom Cerebus thought of immediately when we first encountered the name back in Mind Games I -- the founder of Illusionism.

This Suenteus Po has had several lives. We hear about two of his earlier ones in some detail. Despite not being the first person -- or even the first notable person in Estarcion's history -- to use the name, the first life we are told about is the person who is apparently known to Estarcion history (and the Judge) as Suenteus Po the First. A bit disconcerting that the man known as the first wasn't really the first, but it's sort of like the English Kings -- no one thinks Richard the Lion-Hearted was the first man named Richard who ever lived in England, but he's still King Richard I.

Po tells us that as Suenteus Po I he was was a "reformer." This is an important word in his vocabulary, one he uses many times in his talk with Cerebus. He says of Cerebus that he has a "reform-minded spirit." Just before Cerebus finally meets Po, he goes through a literal "out-of-body" experience (indeed, the entire encounter with Po takes place between Po and *part* of Cerebus' consciousness that has left the rest of him behind), narrated by Po, who says, almost immediately upon their meeting:

Reform is the centerpiece of the story I told you. Formation and reformation. The fragment detaching from the whole; its disposition and course. All that encompasses human experience is contained therein.

Now, the pages in question (139-146 of "Flight") do not describe anything that remotely resembles what I think comes to most people's minds when they hear the word "reform." Sim -- or at least Po -- has taken the word and deconstructed it to an abstraction that bears little, if any, relationship to its everyday meaning. In the course of those pages, in the brief recap quoted above, Cerebus is "re-formed" in some sense, first growing immensely large, then a fragment of him detaching from the rest. But is the resultant Cerebus "better" or "improved" in any way?

Po, as we shall see, would argue that reform in the ordinary sense is impossible. That while a reformer may seek to make things better, all he can possibly do is just make things different, and that he cannot even predict what kind of changes he will end up making.

For what it's worth, and against the charges of those who claim that Dave Sim became conservative when he converted to monotheism (and for that matter, to Dave Sim's own claims that he is in fact a "real" liberal), this is not only a conservative position, but in fact the heart and soul of true conservatism. Change is something to be deeply suspicious of, because it never works out the way the "reformers" intend, and some of the consequences will always be bad. Even changes that turn out to be "for the best" are really not uniformly good, but merely over time and on balance the good changes outweigh the bad ones.

It's important to keep this abstract view of "reform" in mind throughout Po's talk with Cerebus (I say "with" although it's really a monologue -- Cerebus says nothing throughout the encounter, just as he says nothing in his encounters with the Judge and with "Dave"). It's the only way it makes sense to call Cerebus a "reformer" -- he's a thug, after all, who seldom thinks of anything but his own immediate pleasure. When he said near the end of "High Society" that he thought he could "make a difference," many people thought he was suddenly evincing a desire to save the city from its financial disaster, or make it a better place, but it's clear that what he really had in mind were the daydreams of conquest we see him having during the campaign. That's the kind of "difference" he wants to make -- and only the most radical restructuring of the term can think of that in any way as a "reform."

Religion in Cerebus - Mothers and Daughters - Part Two

Let's start with the obvious: Mothers and Daughters consists of four volumes, each with its own title.

Each of these volumes presents a voice engaging in philosophical discourse that goes beyond commenting on the action at hand into analyzing life, the universe, and everything, as Douglas Adams put it.

In the first volume, Flight, the voice is that of Suenteus Po, speaking to Cerebus, although as we shall see one can make the argument that Po is to some extent Dave Sim's mouthpiece, and that Dave is addressing the reader more-or-less directly through Po's discourses to Cerebus.

In the second volume, Women, we have the facing text pages containing extracts from the works of Cirin and Astoria. In this case, any temptation to see either or both of these figures as representing Dave's point of view will be pretty thoroughly exploded by the end of the next volume. Still, it's worth noting ere that the "Cirin" who authored The New Matriarchy, for instance, is probably the *real* Cirin, not Serna/Cirin the usurper. While it may seem inconsistent with his view of women in general, by creating the plot that he did and presenting her to us the way he does, Dave actually seems to have some sympathy with and give some credence to the original Cirin. And while nothing could be farther away from the good and the true, in Dave Sim's mind, than modern feminism and by extension the Kevillism he has said is the Estarcion analogy to it, the character of Astoria, as presented in Women, ends up on a par with Po as one of the most enlightened characters in the entire saga.

The third volume, Reads, has the extended discourse from Viktor Davis that has made "misogyny" an unavoidable word in any serious discussion of Dave Sim -- if you don't use it to describe him, you really have to explain why not, or you're not really being serious.

The final volume, Minds, again has a character ostensibly addressing Cerebus but also speaking directly through the character to the reader, and this time there's no question that the character is Dave's mouthpiece, since the character is, indeed, "Dave," Cerebus' creator.

The extent to which we weigh the relative value or merit of each voice's observations and arguments goes a long way toward deciding which bit of information is reliable, which viewpoint is trustworthy, which conclusion we can be certain Dave Sim shares and wants to get across to the reader.

It's pretty obvious that the Cirinist/Kevillist tracts are not meant to be taken by the reader at face value. They represent, as Dave would now say, the voice of YHWH, or two separate voices of YHWH arguing with herself, splitting and splitting and splitting again in the manner Victor Reid would analyze in Reads (although Victor saw it as an inevitable consequence of Kevillism per se, while Dave would argue that it's a consequence of the feminine mentality). On the other hand, we can assume that these are what Dave Sim considers to be accurate summations of the viewpoints he identifies as Cirinist and Kevillist. What other insight we may be able to glean from them is problematic.

Some readers will find fault with presentation of Po as a spokes-voice for Dave, since Po clearly argues in Reads that there is both a God and a Goddess and seems to be implying that they are equal, a point of view that seems strenuously at odds with Viktor Davis' observations later in the same book. On the other hand, there are many clues that Po is a privileged character, presented to us as one who is superlatively wise, knowledgeable, and trustworthy.

Finally, there are the two different versions of Dave himself, one of whom tells us that the mask of a separate identity with a fictional name is a fundamental necessity, while the other speaks directly to Cerebus with his real name. Is one of these more "real," more truly representative of Dave Sim than the other? Oddly enough, I'll argue that, while both are obviously fictional constructs containing only limited aspects of Dave Sim's real personality, "Viktor Davis" is, by way of being a fuller and more detailed creation, more Dave than "Dave" is.