The classics become subplots

Something Rotten

A Novel

Jasper Fforde

Viking: 392 pp., $24.95

*

A Carnivore’s Inquiry

A Novel

Sabina Murray

Grove Press: 296 pp., $23

*

Infused with humor and extraordinary inventiveness, “Something Rotten,” the fourth in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next detective series, is pure fun.

Part mystery, part fantasy, the series has its own bizarre logic. Thursday Next is an English literary detective who heads Jurisfiction, “the policing agency that operates within fiction to safeguard the stability of the written word.” Reality-bending, time-traveling assignments lead her into the plots of classic novels, where she must ensure that famous characters -- such as Jane Eyre, in the series debut -- are kept safe so their stories remain intact. In Fforde’s wildly imaginative version of late 1980s England, there’s fiction-fiction (the BookWorld) and there’s the “real world.” Even Thursday sometimes struggles to keep things straight.

“Something Rotten” offers such literary cameos as Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (as a Jurisfiction operative), the Cheshire Cat from “Alice in Wonderland” and that famously mopey prince of Denmark. When Thursday drags Hamlet into the “real world,” she explains that he is “here incognito so I’m telling everyone he’s my cousin Eddie.”

Frazzled by having to baby-sit her son, Friday, and the temperamental Dane, Thursday can’t wait to get Hamlet back where he belongs. The harried detective also is determined to find her husband, Landen, who was recently eradicated by a multinational corporation set on global domination and imposing a monolithic religion.

“Something Rotten,” like Fforde’s previous work, is a novel in which anything can happen and no line of dialogue is too absurd. “The BookWorld might be the cat’s pajamas for characterization and explosive narrative,” Thursday tells her mother, “but you can’t get a decent cup of tea for all the bourbon in Hemingway.”

And when Thursday’s mother overhears young Friday babbling incomprehensibly, Thursday says he’s speaking in “Lorem Ipsum,” which she explains is “dummy text used by the printing and typesetting industry to demonstrate layout. I don’t know where he picked it up. Comes from living inside books, I should imagine.”

Bibliophiles will delight in the busy hodgepodge of literary references. Yet this novel is worth reading for anyone with an insatiable appetite for cleverness -- that includes typographical wit and wonderfully quirky illustrations. Even the credits page is an example of the author’s hyperactive imagination: “No penguins were killed or pianos destroyed in order to write this book.” Just roll with it. You’ll be glad you did.

Not so for “A Carnivore’s Inquiry,” the second novel by PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Sabina Murray. Though creepiness abounds in this modern gothic work, it lacks the psychological acuity of, say, Donna Tartt (“The Secret History”) or the late creep-master Patricia Highsmith (“The Talented Mr. Ripley”).

Murray’s itinerant protagonist (and unreliable narrator), 22-year-old Katherine Shea, is deeply cynical, highly literate, incredibly manipulative -- and quite disturbed, which becomes more apparent as the story unfolds. That she, along with every other character, is unappealing and even repugnant may seem like a simplistic, perhaps unfair criticism. Yet the best mystery and thriller writers know how to make the most hard-core sociopaths and psychopaths sympathetic, even charming at some level. (Think Tom Ripley, Hannibal Lecter.) Katherine just leaves you cold. The author doesn’t provide enough insight into her psychology, background or motives, making Katherine too much of a cipher to care about. Is she crazy? Evil? Or just in need a good therapist?

The novel begins as Katherine lands in New York, having left Italy for reasons that are unclear. One day she observes an anxious-looking middle-aged man on a subway platform, whom she recognizes from his author photo as Boris Naryshkin, a Russian-emigre novelist who writes “depressing” books. She engages him in conversation; he invites her to dinner.

Katherine insinuates herself into the cantankerous writer’s life -- moving in with him, freely spending his money, even persuading him to rent a cabin in Maine, which she plans to use as a haven (away from him) as often as possible. Boris’ hostile, overbearing ex-girlfriend, Ann, is suspicious of Katherine, and rightfully so. As Katherine hops around from New York to Maine to Mexico, drinking heavily, cheating on Boris and suffering blackouts, she leaves a trail of mutilated bodies in her wake.

Katherine spends much of her time contemplating the history of cannibalism in art and literature, so it doesn’t take long to figure out who is eating whom. When her estranged father confronts her after a series of grisly murders, she is incredulous: “He seemed to find my motivations a mystery, that I, because of my particular appetite, was the ‘other.’ ” She insists that her father’s “horror of me was not one of incomprehension, but fear.” Can you blame him?

“A Carnivore’s Inquiry” is full of questions for which it fails to provide satisfying answers. As an allegorical tale about human appetite, hunger and consumption, it is hardly original. Knowing that Murray is a very intelligent writer makes it more frustrating that she didn’t take the outlines of this story to a more complex, affecting level.