'No, I think I must have missed it.'
'Oh!' he replied. 'Well, it was really … really quite good, actually. I was glowingly praised as: "Snell is … very good … well rounded is … the phrase I would use" and the book itself was described as: "Surely the biggest piece of … 1986." There's talk of a boxed set, too. Listen, I wanted to tell you that your fiction infraction trial will probably be next week. I tried to get another postponement but Hopkins is nothing if not tenacious; place and time to be decided upon.'
'Should I be worried?' I asked, thinking about the last time I had faced a court here in the BookWorld. It had been in Kafka's The Trial and had turned out predictably unpredictable.
'Not really,' admitted Snell. 'Our "strong readership approval" defence should count for something — after all, you did actually do it, so just plain lying might not help so much after all. Listen,' he went on without stopping for breath, 'Miss Havisham asked me to introduce you to the wonders of the Well — she would have been here this morning but she's on a grammasite extermination course.'
'We saw a grammasite in Great Expectations,' I told him.
'So I heard. You can never be too careful as far as grammasites are concerned.' He looked at ibb and obb, who were just finishing off my bacon and eggs. 'Is this breakfast?'
I nodded.
'Fascinating! I've always wondered what a breakfast looked like. In our books we have twenty-three dinners, twelve lunches and eighteen afternoon teas — but no breakfasts.' He paused for a moment. 'And why is orange jam called marmalade, do you suppose?'
I told him I didn't know and passed him a mug of coffee.
'Do you have any Generics living in your books?' I asked.
'A half-dozen or so at any one time,' he replied, spooning in some sugar and staring at ibb and obb, who, true to form, stared back. 'Boring bunch until they develop a personality, then they can be quite fun. Trouble is, they have an annoying habit of assimilating themselves into a strong leading character, and it can spread among them like a rash. They used to be billeted en masse but that all changed after we lodged six thousand Generics inside Rebecca. In under a month all but eight had become Mrs Danvers. Listen, I don't suppose I could interest you in a couple of housekeepers, could I?'
'I don't think so,' I replied, recalling Mrs Danvers' slightly abrasive personality.
'Don't blame you,' replied Snell with a laugh.
'So now it's only limited numbers per novel?'
'You learn fast. We had a similar problem with Merlins. We've had aged-male-bearded-wizard-mentor types coming out of our ears for years.'
He leaned closer.
'Do you know how many Merlins the Well of Lost Plots has placed over the past fifty years?'
'Tell me.'
'Nine thousand!' he breathed. 'We even altered plot lines to include older male mentor figures! Do you think that was wrong?'
'I'm not sure,' I said, slightly confused.
'At least the Merlin type is a popular character,' added Snell. 'Stick a new hat on him and he can appear pretty much anywhere. Try getting rid of thousands of Mrs Danvers. There isn't a huge demand for creepy fifty-something housekeepers; even buy-two-get-one-free deals didn't help — we use them on anti-mispeling duty, you know. A sort of army.'
'What's it like?' I asked.
'How do you mean?'
'Being fictional.'
'Ah!' replied Snell slowly. 'Yes — fictional.'
I realised too late that I had gone too far — it was how I imagined a dog would feel if you brought up the question of distemper in polite conversation.
'I forgive your inquisitiveness, Miss Next, and since you are an Outlander I will take no offence. If I were you I shouldn't enquire too deeply about the past of fictioneers. We all aspire to be ourselves, an original character in a litany of fiction so vast that we know we cannot. After basic training at St Tabularasa's I progressed to the Dupin School for Detectives; I went on field trips around the works of Hammett, Chandler and Sayers before attending a postgraduate course at the Agatha Christie Finishing School. I would have liked to have been an original but I was born seventy years too late for that.'
He stopped and paused for reflection. I was sorry to have raised the point. It can't be easy, being an amalgamation of all that has been written before.
'Right!' he said, finishing his coffee. 'That's enough about me. Ready?'
I nodded.
'Then let's go.'
So, taking my hand, he transported us both out of Caversham Heights and into the endless corridors of the Well of Lost Plots.
The Well was similar to the Library as regards the fabric of the building — dark wood, thick carpet, tons of shelves — but here the similarity ended. Firstly, it was noisy. Tradesmen, artisans, technicians and Generics all walked about the broad corridors appearing and vanishing as they moved from book to book, building, changing and deleting to the author's wishes. Crates and packing cases lay scattered about the corridor and people ate, slept and conducted their business in shops and small houses built in the manner of an untidy shanty town. Advertising hoardings and posters were everywhere, promoting some form of goods or services unique to the business of writing.'[5]
'I think I'm picking up junk footnoterphone messages, Snell,' I said above the hubbub. 'Should I be worried?'
'You get them all the time down here,' he replied. 'Ignore them — and never pass on chain footnotes.'[6]
We were accosted by a stout man wearing a sandwich board advertising bespoke plot devices 'for the discerning wordsmith'.
'No thank you,' yelled Snell, taking me by the arm and walking us to a quieter spot between Dr Forthright's Chapter Ending Emporium and the Premier Mentor School.
'There are twenty-six floors in the Well,' he told me, waving a hand towards the bustling crowd. 'Most of them are chaotic factories of fictional prose like this one but the twenty-sixth sub-basement has an entrance to the Text Sea — we'll go down there and see them offloading the scrawltrawlers one evening.'
'What do they unload?'
'Words,' smiled Snell, 'words, words and more words. The building blocks of fiction, the DNA of Story.'
'But I don't see any books being written,' I observed, looking around.
He chuckled.
'You Outlanders! Books may look like nothing more than words on a page but they are actually an infinitely complex Imagino-Transference technology that translates odd inky squiggles into pictures inside your head — we're currently using Book Operating System V8.3. Not for long, though — Text Grand Central want to upgrade the system.'
'Someone mentioned UltraWord™ on the news last night,' I observed.
'Fancy-pants name. It's BOOK V9 to me and you. WordMaster Libris should be giving us a presentation shortly. UltraWord™ is being tested as we speak — if it's as good as they say it is, books will never be the same again!'
'Well,' I sighed, trying to get my head around this idea, 'I had always thought novels were just, well, written.'
'Write is only the word we use to describe the recording process,' replied Snell as we walked along. 'The Well of Lost Plots is where we interface the writer's imagination with the characters and plots so that it will make sense in the reader's mind. After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colours of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer — perhaps more.'
5
"… Visit Aaron's Assorted Alliteration Annexe, the superior sellers of stressed syllable or similar-sounding speech sequences since the sixteenth century. Stop soon and see us situated on floor sixteen, shelf six seventy-six …'
6
'… Visit Bill's Dictionorium for every word you'll ever need! From