EARLY RISER

By Jasper Fforde

Reading Jasper Fforde is like being invited to a literary-themed dinner party. You know some things for sure: It’s going to be long, it’s going to get weird and you’re going to have fun. By the end of the night, you will have consumed a great deal. You might not be full, because a lot of what was served was pretty fluffy. But the next morning, you don’t regret having gone. And even if you don’t feel the need to do it again immediately, you’ll say yes the next time you’re invited.

Fforde’s latest, “Early Riser,” is a stand-alone novel. Fans of his previous work, including “The Eyre Affair” (and its many sequels) and “Shades of Grey,” should be right at home in this new book. Although not connected to the Thursday Next series, or any other existing worlds of his, “Early Riser” has all of the elements and sensibility that have earned Fforde a sizable and devoted following: wordplay, allusion, a playful exuberance and — of course — his signature method of World-Building via Copious and Suggestive Use of Capitalization, often in the service of creating Imaginary Socioeconomic Hierarchies and Related Governmental Agencies.

[ Read our review of “The Eyre Affair” ]

The requisite Social Hierarchy in “Early Riser” is sleep-related: who gets to do it, who doesn’t. In the alternate reality of this novel (set in and around Wales), humanity hibernates four months out of every year, like bears, gorging on calories in preparation for the long, severe winter. Those who have the means to afford a drug called Morphenox can ensure that their slumber is dreamless and peaceful.

Why would they want to do this? Because dreams, it is believed, are wasteful, an unnecessary expenditure of calories during a precarious and vulnerable time, putting dreamers at risk of using up all of their stored fats. Worst-case scenario: The dreamer becomes Dead in Sleep. Thus the need for the requisite Governmental Agency to oversee hibernation. The Winter Consuls are those brave and foolhardy individuals tasked with ensuring the safety and well-being of the other 99 percent of humanity.