JASPER FFORDE

The bestselling writer takes us to a world where people hibernate...

Different writers have different ways of approaching their books, but for Jasper Fforde the idea of a “narrative dare” is key. What if you were, for example, to set a thriller “in a world in which humans have always hibernated”? Fforde’s answer to this question is contained within Early Riser, a thriller set in the dead of a winter through which most of the population is slumbering. “It’s like writing a book in a reverse order where the world happens, the detail of the world happens, the dramatic possibilities of the detail in that world happen, and the plot gets tacked on the back of that,” Fforde says.

If that sounds like an arse-about-tit way of doing things, Fforde probably wouldn’t entirely disagree, but in the case of Early Riser, it works a treat as we see winter in a chilly world where, far from people being worried about global warming, they’re concerned about relentlessly advancing glaciers. As the population sleeps, the officers of the Winter Consul watch over them. It’s an inherently spooky idea that draws in part on Fforde’s own time as a focus puller in the film industry working on after-hours shoots when it was, as he remembers it, dark, chilly and the world seemed to operate under different rules.

“There’s a sort of survival instinct that happens when people do night work,” says Fforde. “You talk to emergency services who do night work and [they say] it’s very different, it’s not just a shift, there’s something very different about being around when everybody else is fast asleep.”

Plus, when people are asleep, they’re vulnerable, particularly as in Early Riser there’s the ever-present risk of neither waking up nor passing away quietly in your slumbers, but becoming a “nightwalker”, akin to a zombie yet retaining some of your human qualities – perhaps many human qualities suspects the novel’s hero, Charlie Worthing, a new recruit to the Winter Consul.

SLEEPY HEAD

In part, similarly to MR Carey’s The Girl With All The Gifts and Joe Hill’s The Fireman, this is a way to make readers think about the idea of zombies, to consider things from the perspective of those who, at least in their classic Romero guise, lumber around looking seriously seasick. This doesn’t make zombies inherently likeable characters, but look at what’s happening in any given episode of The Walking Dead, says Fforde, and it’s actually quite odd, troubling.

“You can see all manner of zombies being killed in horrible ways, but they often cut away when so-called ‘humans’ are killed,” he points out. “And that seems strange. Essentially, everyone’s human, but somehow you’re allowed to kill the zombies because they have these rather strange social habits.” Perhaps, he adds, we should think more carefully about the way zombies play on “this primeval fear of the other, this minority other wanting to take over” before we take too much enjoyment in such spectacles, especially in these nervy times when politics has, with apologies, lurched to the right.

DREAM WEAVER

If that makes Early Riser sound like an overtly political novel, it’s not. Rather, to return to that idea of the “narrative dare”, it’s the latest in a long line of novels from Fforde that take a “what-if?” premise as a way to make us look at our own world anew. It’s a technique he first employed in The Eyre Affair (2001), a book about “a literary detective who could travel inside fiction” to encounter characters from famous novels, and which was fiendishly difficult to categorise, even for publishers Hodder & Stoughton.

“Their marketing strategy seems to have run along the lines of ‘don’t ask, read it’,” says Fforde. “That was basically it. It’s quite interesting, they spent the entire publicity and marketing budget on doing galley proofs. So instead of doing the usual 500 perhaps you’d do for a book of that size, they did 5,500. They just made sure it went out to everyone so they could try to build this groundswell of feeling – and that worked, it totally worked.”

Indeed it did. Having spent 11 years trying to become a published writer and finally come up with a book where readers “could go from page to page without wanting to slowly tear their eyes out in anguish”, Fforde was an overnight success, able to give up his work in the film industry. Subsequently, as well as sequels to The Eyre Affair, he’s made his name with other novels, notably The Last Dragonslayer, which was filmed by Sky.

As to what Fforde will be working on next, it’s going to be a book about bunnies, the allegorical Meet The Rabbits. “The narrative dare is that rabbits move in next door to you,” says Fforde. “They’re anthropomorphised rabbits, Mr and Mrs Rabbit, and they have two children, and they just move in next door to my protagonist and the whole village is up in arms. ‘Rabbits. In the neighbourhood. Well, they burrow, you know, and they’ll fill up the school with all their children.’ Again, it’s this idea of [looking at] the minority other, and if you look at the relationship between humans and rabbits, it is not good, not good.”

Early Riser is out now from Hodder & Stoughton.