The Last Dragonslayer

Title: The Last Dragonslayer
Author: Jasper Fforde
Rating: 2 out of 5

Summary (with spoilers):
Jennifer Strange lives in the Ununited Kingdom, where magic is not as powerful as it once was. Jennifer is a foundling of the Blessed Ladies of the Lobster, sent to serve the wizarding agency Kazam. Tiger Prawns, another Lobster foundling, soon joins her. He gets along quite well with the quarkbeast, a fearsome-looking yet friendly pet.

Some of the pre-cogs have a premonition about the death of the last living dragon, which means that the dragon's lands, which are set behind magical marker stones, will soon be available for anyone to claim. When Jennifer tries to discover more, she meets up with the current dragonslayer, who quickly transfers the office to her. Jennifer crosses the marker stones (which only she can do) and speaks to the dragon. She also hires an assistant, Gordon van Gordon. Some of the wizards at Kazam say that Big Magic is afoot.

As the last dragonslayer, Jennifer gets a lot of attention from the press and King Snodd IV, who wants Jennifer to claim the dragon lands for the kingdom before the barrier goes down. When she refuses, the king sends the handsome Sir Matt Grifflon to kill her. The quarkbeast protects Jennifer, and she uses the sword of the dragonslayer to cut through the wall and get away.

On the day when the dragon is destined to die, Jennifer travels to the dragon lands. She runs into Gordon, who has betrayed her and is staking out lands for the Constuff company. He pulls out a gun, and when the quarkbeast runs to protect Jennifer, Gordon kills the quarkbeast. Then Gordon dies when Jennifer threatens to fire him, and he instead resigns (since only the dragonslayer or her apprentice can enter the dragonlands.) The dragon tells Jennifer that she must kill him, and even though she doesn't understand the reason why, she follows his wishes, slaying him with the sword. She gets angry and splits a stone with the sword. It turns out that when a dragon is killed, two dragons are born (but this doesn't work if the dragon dies of old age.) Jennifer is actually a berserker, which is why she was able to channel her rage and renew magic within the Ununited Kingdom.

My Thoughts:
I'm going to preface this by saying that I love much of Jasper Fforde's other work, like the Thursday Next books and Shades of Grey However, this book did not have a lot going for it. Although Wikipedia claims this is a novel for adults, it clearly seems to be a young adult novel to me. (And I often enjoy young adult novels, but not this one.) The book suffers from 3 major problems:  too many characters, infodumping, lack of plot foreshadowing.

A new character is introduced almost every chapter, and most of them serve no specific purpose. Often, they are mentioned once and then never show up again. Why did that random guy have to ask Jennifer on a date in the first chapter? He's never mentioned again. What about the wizard that comes to visit Moobin and explains Big Magic. Couldn't another character have done that just as well? I'm not adverse to having lots of characters, but they need to serve some purpose, apart from just taking up space.

Ah, the infodump, where lots of background information is dumped on the reader in a less than subtle way. When the author wants to tell us the background of magic and the dragonslayers, a random side character is there to take up an entire chapter with the story. If we need to learn about Big Magic, there are some handy wizards to get Jennifer up to speed. (She's in charge of Kazam. You would think she'd know this information by now.)

Despite all of the infodumping, much information is revealed only when it suits the plot. Jennifer's on her way to the epic dragon death. Oh, by the way, did you know that no one can interfere with a dragonslayer when she's on official duty. When Constuff makes it look like the dragon committed some crimes, it turns out that there need to be three instances of dragon crime before the dragonslayer has to kill the dragon. The list just goes on and on. With all of that infodumping, couldn't the author have thrown in some of this information to foreshadow events later in the book? One major rule of writing fantasy is that the magic system has to be consistent. It's bad form to throw a bunch of new rules at the reader for the convenience of the plot.

Fforde is a great writer, but this isn't his best book. Try the Thursday Next series instead.