Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series is, essentially, The Matrix with books instead of computers – that is, books are the portal to the parallel universe where the adventures mostly happen. There must be something going round, because Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y is also, essentially, The Matrix, with books instead of computers. Both writers commendably seek to big up the literary experience in a digital age.

Fforde, of course, adds the element of humour. Thursday, his heroine, works at a carpet warehouse in Swindon, but doubles as an undercover agent for “Jurisfiction”. A gadget enables her to “bookjump” into the fictional universe, where she investigates things such as the disappearance of comedy from the works of Thomas Hardy. Apparently the Wessex novels were a hoot 30 years back.

Even the real world is not the one we know. Wales is a breakaway communist republic with a cheese-based economy. Cloning has been common since the 1970s, so Thursday owns a pet dodo. The big political issue is the mounting Stupidity Surplus. The Commonsense Party government, instead of doing stupid things all the time, acts sensibly, saving up the national stupidity for one colossal blunder to get it all out of the way. (Can this be satire? I don’t recall a government doing anything like – oh. Right.)

Book World is even more bizarre. Characters gossip and watch the cricket when they aren’t being read. Each work has a Core Containment Chamber with an electrical thingy that controls it, and all books are connected to a net. Thursday tells a trainee, “That’s the throughput pipe that takes all the readings to the Story-code Engine Floor at Text Grand Central and from there to the Outland, where they are channelled direct to the reader’s imagination.”

Authors are absent in all this. Forde seems to be well up on fancy French theorists, and Thursday says “the readers are everything”. Well, not quite everything. The works of Jane Austen are in the hangar for a refit supervised by the talented, if surreal, book engineer Isambard Kingdom Buñuel. Isambard respects the original work, but back in the Outland, the evil Goliath Corporation plans to make Pride and Prejudice into a reality-TV dating show which, by an abstruse technical process, involving a recipe for unscrambling eggs and thus turning back time, will destroy the book forever. Only Thursday can stop it.

Fforde is highly inventive. One extraordinary passage, where Thursday finds herself in a book as it is read, comes off brilliantly. So does the bit where the baddies maroon her in an ethics lecture, as captain of the SS Moral Dilemma on the Hypothetical Ocean. All the same, I would have thought the whole thing was too arch, airless and artificial to succeed. In fact, the series sells well, which shows what I know. But I’d rather get my comic female-private-eye action from the excellent Janet Evanovich.

Scarlett Thomas has moved from the crime genre to literary fiction, but aims at cult appeal. Her heroine Ariel, a promiscuous PhD student, is studying the forgotten Victorian novelist Thomas Lumas. His most mysterious work, The End of Mr Y, exists only in a single surviving copy, which is locked in a German bank vault. (Ex libris A Hitler, according to the internet.) The book is said to be cursed. Anyone who reads it dies, as did the author, publisher and printer at the time it came out. Ariel is sceptical, but her professor disappears and she suspects he found and read a copy. Then, in a dusty box in a secondhand bookshop, she discovers . ..

Thomas can do sheer magic as far as the conjuration of a compelling tale goes. But, as so often, exposition and development prove more interesting than resolution. And she requires us to take homeopathy seriously. The secret of Lumas’s book, revealed quite early, is a tincture, like the pill in The Matrix, that enables access to a psychic otherworld – called the Troposphere by Lumas, before the word meant the lowest atmospheric layer.

I’m not sure the Troposphere convinces quite like Narnia or Elidor, despite the postmodern intellectual apparatus and frequent citings of Derrida. One day, though, Thomas will sell the reader a pink elephant of finest pedigree to the satisfaction of all concerned. Maybe this time, if the reader isn’t an empirical old curmudgeon like me.

FIRST AMONG SEQUELS by Jasper Fforde
Hodder £12.99 pp404

THE END OF MR Y by Scarlett Thomas
Canongate £10.99 pp435

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