Early Riser.

Jasper Fforde was one of my favorite authors in the first decade of the 2000s, from his Thursday Next series (starting with The Eyre Affair) to the two Nursery Crimes stories to his Shades of Grey, a brilliant, dystopian novel that ended on a still unresolved cliffhanger. I even got my daughter hooked on his young adult trilogy that began with The Last Dragonslayer, also still hanging as he decided to make it a tetralogy. All of his output screeched to a six-year halt, however, due to what he termed a “creative hiatus,” that ended with the long-awaited release in early 2019 of a new, standalone, self-contained novel, Early Riser.

Fforde started talking about this novel in the early 2010s, although I think it has undergone many changes since that point. It’s also a dystopian story, unrelated to Shades, this one in an alternate universe where the planet is exceptionally cold and humans must hibernate during winters. Set in Wales, where Fforde lives, the book follows Charlie Worthing as he’s brought into the equivalent of the night police in this world and uncovers a plot around “nightwalkers,” people whose cognitive functions have been severely impaired by interruptions to their winter sleep cycles. Such people, who kind of resemble docile zombies, take on menial labor tasks for the conglomerate HiberTech, which also produces the drug (Morphenox) that allows people to hibernate in dreamless sleep that doesn’t require the kind of calorie-loading other species must undertake before several months of slumber.

Fforde’s genius in all of his books prior to Early Riser was his humor, which played out in multiple ways, from slapstick to wordplay to more ornate situational gags. It’s almost completely absent in Early Riser, and there are a few points where it seems like he’s trying to be funny and failing – none more obviously so in his character names, which has turned from an amusing sideline from earlier books (e.g., just about all characters in the Thursday Next series have absurd names, from the title character to Braxton Hicks to Brikk Schitt-Hawse) into a tired bit here. Just one character has a clever name in this book, and I can’t mention it here because of the spoiler involved, but it’s not even a bad pun – just a smart, slightly esoteric reference that made me think, “yeah, actually, that is a pretty good name.”

The rest of the story, however, just isn’t funny in any way. So many reviews cite how hilarious the book is, but it’s not – the story itself feels serious, and most of the plot itself tends towards the serious side. I can see places where Fforde tried to add some levity, such as the occasional, bold-and-italic “Whump” lines that indicate somebody got hit by surprise, but his light touch with dialogue and story are absent here. It makes sense on some level that Fforde is trying to tell a more serious tale here, with both an unsubtle climate-change allegory and a more directly anti-corporate take than the parodic Goliath of the Thursday Next series, but it’s distracting to read Fforde’s voice as if its affect has gone flat.

As for the story itself … it’s fine, nothing more. I never felt all that invested in Charlie’s story, or the person he ultimately tries to save, in part because I knew the former was going to work out (and had a rough idea of how) and because the latter character isn’t well developed enough before she ends up in jeopardy. It seems like Fforde might have wanted to go to a darker, creepier place than in his other books, but pulled up a little short rather than committing fully to creating something so contrary to his prior work. The dark of the novel – there are multiple scenes set outside in blizzard conditions, so Charlie can’t see what’s happening – doesn’t quite lend itself to the sense of foreboding that Fforde seemed to want. The result undermines a bit of the allegory within the book as well: I could understand the goal of the climate-change metaphor, but it felt distant from the plot itself.

The good news, I suppose, is that the creative hiatus is over, and Fforde’s next book, The Constant Rabbit, is due out in the UK in July of 2020, to be followed by the fourth and final Dragonslayer book within twelve months. He still owes us the Shades of Grey sequel and I suppose one more (final?) Thursday Next novel, but at least now he’s back to writing regularly.

Next up: I’m almost through Manjit Kumar’s Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality as well as Alan Alda’s If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?