Eyre Affair

Rating:
Summary: "Reality, to be sure, was beginning to bend..."
Review: "The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think." This statement just about sums up "The Eyre Affair," a bizarre blend of mystery, fantasy, alternate universe novel, satire, and a dash of horror and scifi. With its likeable heroine and delightful plot, this is one that bibliophiles will drool over. It's sort of as if Terry Pratchett wrote mysteries.

It takes place an alternate world where the Crimean War has lasted over a century, vampirism and lycanthropy are like diseases, time can be warped, and people can fall in and out of books and plays -- and if it's the original work, it will change all the other copies. Thursday Next is an agent for a special division devoted to literature, and is on the trail of the villainous Acheron Hades after the theft of the manuscript of "Martin Chuzzlewit" by Charles Dickens. To complicate matters more, her old boyfriend Landen has reentered the picture, and the obnoxious Schitt of the powerful Goliath Corporation is following Thursday.

Hades seems to have been killed, but Thursday is almost sure that he isn't. It turns out she's right -- he kidnaps her aunt and "mad as pants" uncle Mycroft Next, who has just made a machine that allows people to wander into pieces of literature. Hades's plot is to use the machine to disrupt literature as we know it. First he kills a minor character from "Martin Chuzzlewit," and then kidnaps Jane Eyre (in this parallel universe, the novel has a very different ending). Thursday Next teams up with the brooding Rochester and an odd bunch of characters to save Jane -- and all the other great works of literature.

This is one of the best-conceived and best-executed ideas in recent years. A lot of readers probably won't understand all of the literary jokes and in-jokes (it sounds snobby, I know, but if you don't get something then just skip it), as well as some that anybody can understand (like the invention of the banana). The idea of high art as pop culture is delightfully done, like the guy with the "Hand of God" tattoo, or the door-to-door Baconian missionaries, or a John Milton convention. Take a sprinkling of real-life pop culture, make it art-inclined, and that's what you get.

One of the best things about this book is that it overflows with promise for sequels in this universe. Time travel, a chilling scene with a lisping vampire, lycanthropy, and the wealth of literature are all dealt with, but not so thoroughly that it can't be used again. The writing style is spare and fast-moving, sort of like Terry Pratchett's but more detailed. The dialogue is very good, with a lot of good quotables.

Thursday Next is a likable female lead, very hard-boiled, tough and smart, but with a vulnerable side. Uncle Mycroft is just delightful, mad as pants! Acheron Hades is one of those villains who loves evil for its own sake (well, with a name like "Hades," what can you expect?), and people who like a complex reason for a person to be bad won't like him. I thought he was fantastic, especially the line "I'm just... well, differently moralled, that's all." And Thursday's dad steals every scene he's in, as the casual time traveller who's always setting things right in history, and stops time when he appears ("My father had a face that could stop a clock"). And who couldn't love Pickwick the dodo?

Jasper Fforde's first novel is a slightly frothy, book-hopping, tongue-in-cheek novel. It may not be a work of literature equal to "Jane Eyre," but it's a supremely entertaining and promising one.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing, funny and intelligent
Review: Jasper Fforde is one of those authors where you read, stop, think, then have to read again. I've read most of the books he references, but they way he writes makes me wonder if perhaps I'm remembering them wrong. He tests your knowledge of literature and history, especially with the constantly in-flux time-space continuum. The word play is hokey in a good-humored, self-aware way (the later books are far worse - or better - in that regard), some of the characters are stock (such as the crazy inventor uncle or the scheming corporate shark), but Fforde creates a beautiful, enchanting world where people can enter into books along with the characters, dodos are the trendiest pets, and where followers of Kip Marlow (the contemporary of Shakespeare) go door to door like alternate-universe Jehovah's witnesses.

Rating:
Summary: Eyre Affair - a good read
Review: This is a great book for those of you who majored in English lit - you'll get all the jokes. And, it's still enjoyable for the rest of us. It takes place in an altered British reality with a fun main character, Tuesday Next, who is alternately an action hero, a scholar and a young, hip Brit on the order of Brigett Jones. Some of the literary word play was fun while some was a little too obvious and silly. It does have a good story, though and it's a fun read.