Fforde in the magic market

I must admit I had my doubts about Jasper Fforde's Dragonslayer series. It combines two genres I'm prejudiced against: the "young adult" genre and the magic/fantasy genre. If you are a "young adult", that is a teenager, you are already fully capable of reading and enjoying books written for, well, older adults, such as the classics. So why write books especially for the teenage market? As to magic, ever since Harry Potter - or perhaps even before that - this genre feels overcrowded. Even contrasting the workings of magic with everyday life with comic effect has, surely, been done. However, in spite of my reservations, I had a good time reading Fforde's last Dragonslayer offering, The Song of the Quarkbeast.

The first Dragonslayer book, The Last Dragonslayer, though witty and with a feisty Ffordian heroine in the plucky sixteen-year-old foundling Jennifer Strange, was a bit too preachy and pro-dragon for my taste. I ended up longing for Jennifer to run her sword through the tiresome creature. The Song of the Quarkbeast, however, cuts down on the anti-corporation, give-peace-a-chance homilies to good effect, and there's mercifully no self-important dragon to be seen. Jennifer Strange, with the help of the precocious twelve-year-old fellow foundling "Tiger" Prawns - a likeable sidekick, once again very much in the Ffordian tradition - is running or trying to run a company called Kazam, whose employees are a group of shambolic wizards trying to flog their magic powers for a few quid. Their tasks are most often unglamorous: plumbing, rewiring, delivering pizza by way of flying carpet etc.

At first, I thought the book would be mainly about Kazam trying to fight off a hostile take-over bid from their one competitor iMagic ("putting 'i' in front of anything makes it more hip and current"). The stakes didn't seem that high - after all, Kazam could do with a bit more business acumen, as displayed by iMagic's (of course) goateed head Conrad Blix. And then suddenly, at the big showdown competition between the two companies, the tension rises considerably thanks to a clever plot twist. It is no longer a question of magic morals, or of preserving the eponymous quarkbeasts (Jennifer has a soft spot for them, as one of them saved her life in The Last Dragonslayer, but it is hard to share her enthusiasm completely). It is a matter of saving lives - lots of them.

I'm hard pressed to find much difference between this novel and those for Fforde's adult readership. He certainly doesn't talk down to his young readers - and there is probably no need to either, as British youngsters have been fed such brain-twisters as Doctor Who with their mother's milk. The Song of the Quarkbeast is not exactly nuanced, it's true, but then nuance isn't Fforde's forte in his other books, either. He disarms grumbling about black-and-white characterisation by having fun with typical baddie clichés - and goodie clichés, for that matter. Blix consciously plays up to the Evil Genius image, while Jennifer is more than once criticised - not altogether unjustly - by various villains for her exaggerated self-righteousness.

As usual, Fforde has created a parallel world where, for instance, Britain is divided into small entities (kingdoms, duchys and the like) and is called the unUnited Kingdom. It is a fun place to spend some time in. However, I still prefer the Thursday Next series to everything else Fforde has written. The world of literature is the most grippingly magic place of all.