THURSDAY NEXT – Thursday Next, a Life in SpecOps

It was a bright and clear morning in mid-July two weeks later when I found myself on the corner of Broome Manor Lane in Swindon, on the opposite side of the road to my mother's house, with a toddler in a pushchair, two dodos, the Prince of Denmark, an apprehensive heart and hair cut way too short. The Council of Genres hadn't taken the news of my resignation very well. In fact, they refused to accept it at all and gave me instead unlimited leave, in the somewhat deluded hope that I might return if actualising my husband 'didn't work out'. They also suggested I might like to deal with escaped fictionaut Yorrick Kaine, someone with whom I had crossed swords twice in the past.

Hamlet had been a late addition to my plans. Increasingly concerned over reports that he was being misrepresented as something of a 'ditherer' in the Outland, he had requested leave to see for himself. This was unusual in that fictional characters are rarely troubled by public perception, but Hamlet would worry about having nothing to worry about if he had nothing to worry about, and since he was the indisputable star of the Shakespeare canon and had lost the 'Most Troubled Romantic Lead' crown to Heathcliff once again at this year's BookWorld awards, the Council of Genres thought they should do something to appease him. Besides, Jurisfiction had been trying to persuade him to police Elizabethan drama since Sir John Falstaff retired on grounds of 'good health', and a trip to the Outland, it was thought, might persuade him.

'’Tis very strange!' he murmured, staring at the sun, trees, houses and traffic in turn. 'It would take a rhapsody of wild and whirling words to do justice to all that I witness!'

'You're going to have to speak English out here.'

'All this,' explained Hamlet, waving his hands at the fairly innocuous Swindon street, 'would take millions of words to describe correctly!'

'You're right. It would. That's the magic of the book ImaginoTransference technology,' I told him. 'A few dozen words conjure up an entire picture. But in all honesty the reader does most of the work.'

'The reader? What's it got to do with them?'

'Well, each interpretation of an event, setting or character is unique to the person who reads it because they clothe the author's description with the memory of their own experiences. Every character they read is actually a complex amalgam of people that they've met, read or seen before – far more real than it can ever be just from the text on the page. Because every reader's experiences are different, each book is unique for each reader.'

'So,' replied the Dane, thinking hard, 'what you're saying is that the more complex and apparently contradictory the character, the greater the possible interpretations?'

'Yes. In fact, I'd argue that every time a book is read by the same person it is different again – because the reader's experiences are changed, or they are in a different frame of mind.'