The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next Book 1)

published	February 25th 2003 by Penguin (Non-Classics)
first published	2001
binding	Paperback
isbn	0142001805 (isbn13: 9780142001806)
url	http://www.thursdaynext.com
pages	384
description	Penzler Pick, January 2002: When I first heard the premise of this unique mystery, I doubted that a first-time author could pull off a compli...more [close] Penzler Pick, January 2002: When I first heard the premise of this unique mystery, I doubted that a first-time author could pull off a complicated caper involving so many assumptions, not the least of which is a complete suspension of disbelief. Jasper Fforde is not only up to the task, he exceeds all expectations. Imagine this. Great Britain in 1985 is close to being a police state. The Crimean War has dragged on for more than 130 years and Wales is self-governing. The only recognizable thing about this England is her citizens' enduring love of literature. And the Third Most Wanted criminal, Acheron Hades, is stealing characters from England's cherished literary heritage and holding them for ransom. Bibliophiles will be enchanted, but not surprised, to learn that stealing a character from a book only changes that one book, but Hades has escalated his thievery. He has begun attacking the original manuscripts, thus changing all copies in print and enraging the reading public. That's why Special Operations Network has a Literary Division, and it is why one of its operatives, Thursday Next, is on the case. Thursday is utterly delightful. She is vulnerable, smart, and, above all, literate. She has been trying to trace Hades ever since he stole Mr. Quaverley from the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and killed him. You will only remember Mr. Quaverley if you read Martin Chuzzlewit prior to 1985. But now Hades has set his sights on one of the plums of literature, Jane Eyre, and he must be stopped. How Thursday achieves this and manages to preserve one of the great books of the Western canon makes for delightfully hilarious reading. You do not have to be an English major to be pulled into this story. You'll be rooting for Thursday, Jane, Mr. Rochester--and a familiar ending. --Otto Penzler From the book jacket: "Set in the surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and lterature is taken very, very seriously. England is in a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Bronte's novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide." [close]
date added	01-03-07 edit book

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Danielle rated it:

06/12/08

bookshelves: stopped-reading

Read in February, 2008

I've been storing up some venom for this review, so be prepared.
First of all, I want to unleash my fury on whoever in the Rory Gilmore Book Club suggested this book as February's pick. To go from such a brilliant read as Jane Eyre to this was frustrating to say the least. It highlighted all the amateurish contrivances of Fforde's writing. I rolled my eyes so many times in the first four chapters, that I nearly gave myself a headache. And no, I...more I've been storing up some venom for this review, so be prepared.
First of all, I want to unleash my fury on whoever in the Rory Gilmore Book Club suggested this book as February's pick. To go from such a brilliant read as Jane Eyre to this was frustrating to say the least. It highlighted all the amateurish contrivances of Fforde's writing. I rolled my eyes so many times in the first four chapters, that I nearly gave myself a headache. And no, I'm sure it doesn't get better after that, that's just where I officially banished the book from my sight.
Here are my major problems with the part I read.
1. Okay, you're enterting this alternate reality world where many things are similar but different from what we know. As Fforde might assume that not all of his readers would be British, or familiar with UK current events/history, perhaps he could have given us a little more to go on, so that the reader could appreciate the weirdness of this other world, without going, "Umm...from the way that's said, I'm assuming that's not how it happened in real life."
2. Thursday Next. Seriously? Thursday Next. That just screams: "I'm writing a strong yet lovably flawed female gumshoe destined to drag you through book after book of literary-themed exploits." Her character was so stereotypical I could have written it with my eyes closed.
3. The time-travelling father.
4. If a book is written in first-person, and you really, REALLY want us to know what the character looks like, it is textbook cliche to have her pull out a mirror and describe what she sees. Puh-lease.
5. Finally, the clincher at the end of chapter four (I think. I wasn't paying all THAT much attention), but the straw that made me put away the book for good is that Fforde CLEVERLY (I felt like the whole of the book was trying just a little too hard to be clever) had Thursday narrate what had happened in her confrontation with her nemesis by putting her in an interrogation setting, where she has to tell the police investigators (and us, conveniently) what happened prior to her month-long coma. Okay, that in and of itself is not so bad, what kills me is when the only difference between what she says into the tape recorder and what she says in her narration of any other part of the book is the double quotation marks. Seriously, no one answers an investigator's question of, "So what happened next," by saying, "'What do you think you're doing?' I said. 'It's time for me to make my exit,' he answered with a smile." People write books like that. They don't talk like that. It was ridiculous.
Anyway, I guess I wouldn't be so annoyed with this book, except that it's supposed to be "delightful" for bibliophiles because it assumes all this familiarity with the classics, yet anyone who had read said classics would inevitably chafe under the obvious inferiority of this freshman attempt....less

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Shannon rated it:

(review of isbn 0340825766)

04/20/08

bookshelves: 2008, contemporary-fiction, crime, magical-realism, mystery

Read in April, 2008

It is 1985 and the world isn't quite as we know it. Nor is history the same. There's a lot of odd things going on, otherwordly creatures are real, some people can go back and forth in time, literature is BIG, and the Crimean war has been going on since the 1800s. Thursday Next, a veteran of this war, now works for SpecOps (Special Operations) 27- the Literatec division. She's a kind of literature detective, and when the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit vanishes, she is brought int...more It is 1985 and the world isn't quite as we know it. Nor is history the same. There's a lot of odd things going on, otherwordly creatures are real, some people can go back and forth in time, literature is BIG, and the Crimean war has been going on since the 1800s. Thursday Next, a veteran of this war, now works for SpecOps (Special Operations) 27- the Literatec division. She's a kind of literature detective, and when the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit vanishes, she is brought into a much bigger case involving her old Uni professor, Acheron Hades, now a master-mind criminal.

Hades' plan is fairly simple: using Thursday's uncle's Prose Portal invention, he can kidnap characters from manuscripts and hold them to ransom. Literature being as important as it is in this world, you can bet he can demand millions. When his plan for Chuzzlewit doesn't go quite as planned, he steals the manuscript for Jane Eyre instead.

In this story, the plot of Jane Eyre is a bit different. Namely, she marries her cousin St John and goes to India with him. Or Africa, wherever it was. Everyone agrees it's a disappointing ending, not least of all Rochester himself, whom Thursday has a few run-ins with. It seems popping in and out of books isn't so hard as you might think. I do have to wonder, though, at Thursday's run-down of the plot for her colleague's benefit, because I have to disagree on a few points: firstly, Rochester fell in love with Jane pretty much straight away, he just didn't show it; secondly, he never intended to marry Blanche Inghram, that was just a ploy to get Jane jealous and make her love him back; and maybe it's naive of me, and maybe it's the opposite, but I don't know that there's much proof that Adele was Rochester's "love-child".

Anyway. The plot might seem a little confusing, because there's so much happening at once, but it's not. It's fast-paced and funny, and also highly original. I do have to question the curious use of a first-person omniscient narrator - though in this particular world, anything goes; it's just a bit odd to have scenes related in detail of which Thursday wasn't present for. Also, and this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, when someone is retelling a situation that includes a conversation, no one says things like "I stammered in reply" and "There was a pause. Acheron smiled." Seriously, this kind of thing is very distracting because it's so utterly implausible and unrealistic.

Also, I don't know how much of literature or anything else you could learn from a book like this, which is at its heart mocking, and full of deviances. I wouldn't take anything for fact. But I loved the joke names, especially the (rather obvious) Jack Schitt - oh loads of fun there! Thursday's uncle, Mycroft Next, the inventor, is a bit like Q from the James Bond movies, but much more vague; anyway, his inventions are quite funny. The side-plot of the Crimean war adds a serious bent to the novel, and is plenty pertinent.

In short, it wasn't quite what I was expecting but I enjoyed it immensely. I loved how the ending of Jane Eyre - one of my favourite books by the way - was changed to the one that we are familiar with sort-of by accident. And I loved the idea of the characters living the life of the story, over and over again, but able to do more or less as they liked when they weren't in the scene. Rochester was wonderful :)...less

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Alana rated it:

(review of isbn 0670030643)

06/18/08

bookshelves: 2008june

Read in March, 2002

6/18/08

Alright. I'm leaving the five star ranking. I've been waffling back and forth to changing it to four, but really, for the creativity alone, this book deserves notice.

It's hard to summarize this book to do it justice, but here goes. Imagine a world rather similar to ours, but with a few minor adjustments. For instance. A

The Eyre Affair is Jasper Fforde's first novel, and what a novel it is. For starters, this is a dream for the average person who calls them...more 6/18/08

Alright. I'm leaving the five star ranking. I've been waffling back and forth to changing it to four, but really, for the creativity alone, this book deserves notice.

It's hard to summarize this book to do it justice, but here goes. Imagine a world rather similar to ours, but with a few minor adjustments. For instance. A

The Eyre Affair is Jasper Fforde's first novel, and what a novel it is. For starters, this is a dream for the average person who calls themselves a book lover... a literary fantasy where the boundary between the world in books and the "real" world is decidedly thinner than we think. For instance, in this novel, Thursday Next (our intrepid heroine) fights the forces of evil (archvillain Acheron Hades). Why is he evil? Well, with the use of a prose portal (developed by Thursday's own uncle), Acheron plans on entering the original manuscripts of beloved novels and murdering characters from within, thus removing them from all published versions of those works. That might be the gist of it, but that doesn't even touch on how interesting this world is... and so I've also pasted here whatever was printed on B&N:

The word "unique" is overused and frequently misused. Here, however, is an instance where it truly applies. But to call The Eyre Affair a unique first novel featuring a fearless fictional adventurer barely begins to tell the story. When asked to summarize his creation is a single sentence, Jasper Fforde described it as "a literary detective thriller with romantic overtones, mad-inventor uncles, aunts trapped in Wordsworth poems, global multinationals, scheming evildoers, an excursion inside the novel Jane Eyre, dodos, knight-errant-time-traveling fathers, and the answer to the eternal question: Who really wrote Shakespeare's plays?" Swindon, a traditionally tranquil English town, is the ironic setting for most of these oddball characters and peculiar goings-on; the year is 1985. Fforde spins his wildly imaginative crime caper in language every bit as ingenious as the madcap plot; his devilishly clever turns of phrase take the form of verbal puzzles, anagrams, and literary and cinematic in-jokes.

Long involved in the movie-making business, Fforde gives a starring role to Thursday Next, a captivating sleuth whose respect for literature matches that of her creator. The essence of Thursday's quest is the capture of Acheron Hades, a wily cad whose dastardly crime is murder of characters from the classics.

If that hasn't gotten you hooked, I don't know what to tell you. It's a really fun book to read. I'm going to keep re-reading the sequels now.

6/16/08

The first time I read this book, I was on a plane flying home from my freshman year at college for spring break. Aside from the fact that it was the first bit of reading I had selected for myself in quite a while (and let me tell you -- buying a hardcover book in college when it isn't for a class is a big deal), it was intelligent and creative and I remember looking up repeatedly, unable to contain my giddiness at finding such a book.

Now I'm a little older and wiser, but while home this weekend and without a new book to read, I opted to re-read this one and I haven't felt disappointed by that decision yet. It may not be as mind-blowingly delightful as when I first discovered it, but I'm still thrilled with Fforde's incredibly original plotline....less

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Jason rated it:

10/20/07

Read in October, 2007

(The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of the literary genre known as "speculative" fiction; for those not familiar with it, the genre primarily concerns itself with historical questions of "what if?" What if the South had won the Civil War, for example, or the Nazis World War II? What if computers, robots and nuclear weapons had been invented in the 1840s instead ...more (The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of the literary genre known as "speculative" fiction; for those not familiar with it, the genre primarily concerns itself with historical questions of "what if?" What if the South had won the Civil War, for example, or the Nazis World War II? What if computers, robots and nuclear weapons had been invented in the 1840s instead of the 1940s? It is a great genre for those intrigued by the issues raised in science-fiction, but who do not care for the more hard-edged fetishes of that particular genre (the spaceships, the lasers, the aliens); because ultimately speculative fiction relies a lot more on real history and sociology for its ultimate entertainment value than most traditional sci-fi, making it a good place to regularly find big crossover hits.

One such hit, for example, has turned out to be the delightful 2002 speculative novel The Eyre Affair, by the Douglas-Adamsesque Jasper Fforde; it has in fact inspired an entire series of popular novels since then set in the same speculative universe, collectively known as the "Thursday Next" series because of its main protagonist. The latest, First Among Sequels, just came out this summer; I've heard a lot of great things about all the books in the series, so thought I'd start at the beginning and finally experience them for myself. And man, what a speculative world this turns out to be -- it is an entire alternate Earth that Fforde creates, in fact, one much like ours in many ways but with there also being telling differences. Like...

--In Fforde's world, Russia never had a Soviet revolution, and is still run by the Tsarist royal family;

--As a result, England and Russia have been fighting the Crimean War for 131 years now, the entire thing turning into a Vietnam-like unwinnable mess that neither side can politically walk away from anymore;

--As a result of that, England in Fforde's world never reaches Empire status, with among the results being a fiercely independent and antagonistic Republic of Wales, as well as a virtual police state in England itself, put in place by an all-consuming private corporation called Goliath;

--It is in some respects a book nerd's dream world, a world where obscure Victorian authors are considered rock stars, and the argument over whether Shakespeare really existed or not one that spills over into street gangs and organized religions;

--And it is also a world where several topics we consider "supernatural" are to them very real and even blase -- a world that has perfected cloning, a world where time travel is an accepted reality (if not a highly controlled activity), with a series of secret government divisions in charge of regulating and policing the various industries involved.

We as the readers, then......less

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Sfdreams rated it:

(review of isbn 0670030643)

06/08/08

bookshelves: reviewed

Read in May, 2008

recommended to Sfdreams by: Lisa Vegan
recommends it for: everyone, especially those with a sense of humor

I resisted reading this book for quite awhile, but thankfully, my friend Lisa (LisaVegan), kept bugging me about it! I thought that I would not appreciate it as I have never read Jane Eyre. But, Lisa is right, you do not have to know anything about Jane Eyre to understand this book.

I am thankful to Lisa, and to Goodreads, because I probably would have never stumbled upon this delightful book otherwise, as I rarely visit the SF shelves at the library.

I only found one annoyan...more

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Chris rated it:

05/20/08

bookshelves: i-own

Read in May, 2008

I am absolutely thrilled with the world of Thursday Next as created by Fforde. At first, I thought it was odd that he planned to take us a mere ~20 years into the past when creating this world. But as I continued into the story, I was entranced by the intricate world that had been created by Fforde's wonderful brush strokes. This definitely isn't the 1985 I grew up in.

There are so many intricacies that make this world great, it's hard to pinpoint just one or two favorites. As a fan of &q...more I am absolutely thrilled with the world of Thursday Next as created by Fforde. At first, I thought it was odd that he planned to take us a mere ~20 years into the past when creating this world. But as I continued into the story, I was entranced by the intricate world that had been created by Fforde's wonderful brush strokes. This definitely isn't the 1985 I grew up in.

There are so many intricacies that make this world great, it's hard to pinpoint just one or two favorites. As a fan of "conspiracies" and "secret police" and other "above the law" organizations, I really enjoyed the SpecOps and Goliath organizations, the first being government sanctioned and the other being a corporate entity with a stranglehold on the government. I loved that SpecOps was more than just a "police" force, but rather dealt with intriguing and fantastical ideas like time travel, supernatural creatures and, of course, literary crimes.

The idea of "crimes of literature" was actually part of what attracted me to this novel in the first place. I've been a fan of books and literature for as long as I can really remember. I remember being outraged while reading Fahrenheit 451. This world is sort of the antithesis of the 451 world. In the world of Thursday Next, books and literature are vitally important to the world.

I loved picturing rabid fans of Shakespeare having riots over the authorship of the Bard's plays (I really loved the "resolution" provided at the end of the book). I found it fascinating to think of there being uprisings at slight textual changes in books or at disappearances of very minor characters in other books. The idea of actually stepping into a novel was by far the most exciting literary concept presented.

Imagine, being able to step inside a favorite novel or poem and actually experience it first hand! I also loved (and I won't "spoil" this for you) the idea the Goliath corp had for the technology.

Fforde's world and creativity are amazing. There were moments that I felt as though he was going too far down a path he didn't need to. But the depth and detail he gave to his interesting creations made it all worth it. And then seeing him link together seemingly innocuous events and items was all the more rewarding. (My sis-in-law mentioned that some of the innocuous actions he presented in this first book actually play into the plot of the 3rd book...awesome!).

I also loved the "excerpts" from other books (also fictionally created by our author) added at the beginning of each chapter. This was a great subtle and yet effective and intriguing touch.

Apart from the occasional moments when it felt like things were "dragging" unnecessarily (which, as I mentioned above, played themselves out), my only other real complaint was the interference from the Bookworms into the text itself. After the Bookworms ate down hyphens and ampersands, the spoken words of the characters became very annoying to read. I think that could have been a little more subtle, or ignored completely.

Otherwise, an amazingly wonderful book and I'm excited to continue in the series.

****
4 stars...less

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Krista rated it:

02/02/08

Read in November, 2007

(Violence alert: The body count is high, plus some grossness factor.)
It’s a spy thriller. No, wait — it’s science fiction. No, wait — it’s literary criticism. No, wait — it’s art history. No, wait — it’s historical-political commentary. No, wait — it’s romantic comedy. No, wait — it’s an epic war drama. No, wait — it’s — oh, look — Japanese tourists!

While I applaud the spirit of many of the directions this novel takes, you kind of have to wonder if the aut...more (Violence alert: The body count is high, plus some grossness factor.)
It’s a spy thriller. No, wait — it’s science fiction. No, wait — it’s literary criticism. No, wait — it’s art history. No, wait — it’s historical-political commentary. No, wait — it’s romantic comedy. No, wait — it’s an epic war drama. No, wait — it’s — oh, look — Japanese tourists!

While I applaud the spirit of many of the directions this novel takes, you kind of have to wonder if the author could have focused just a tad bit more...

So here’s the interesting aspect of this novel: Fforde envisions an alternate reality in which wars are (literally) waged over ideas, a fantasy in which literature and art are at the center of people’s daily concerns. In one incidental moment, the main character turns on the TV in her hotel room; a news reporter is reporting on riots that broke out while Neoclassicists were protesting the 10-year anniversary of the legalization of Surrealism.

Eventually (three-quarters of the way through the novel), the main event occurs: an English professor gone bad kidnaps Jane Eyre from page 100-something of the original manuscript, erasing the text of the remaining pages from all copies of the book and causing millions of Jane Eyre fans to come out of the woodwork and hold weepy candlelight vigils.

Our heroine, LiteraTec (literary detective) Thursday Next, must restore Jane to her rightful place in the novel, keep the evil villian away from Miss Eyre, and supervise the plot from inside the book as the book "rewrites" itself. Things go awry, of course, and the original manuscript is compromised — but with felicitous consequences for Miss Eyre, Mr. Rochester, and Jane Eyre fans everywhere.

Of course, the author of a book like this must hope to capitalize on a pre-existing Jane Eyre fan base...but the danger in writing derivative literary fiction is that, while your book may be a perfectly good book in many ways, you are putting your reader in mind of really great literature, next to which your book is doomed to lose by comparison. And as the plot of Jane Eyre droned on from Thursday Next's perspective, I couldn’t help thinking, "I’d rather be reading Jane Eyre."

The final twist in the love story is, I have to admit, cute — but not cute enough for me to recommend the book, at least not to someone exactly like me. However, if a heavy dose of violence doesn’t make you queasy and you can hold on for a roller-coaster ride of genre-bending twists and turns, you might enjoy the cleverness of it....less

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Ana T. rated it:

(review of isbn 034073356X)

04/04/08

bookshelves: borrowed, fantasy

Read in March, 2008

When I first heard of this book I was really curious about it. I love Jane Eyre and the idea of someone entering the book and actually talking to the characters seemed a fabulous one. It was original, interesting and, for fans of the story, absolutely irresistible.

In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can...more When I first heard of this book I was really curious about it. I love Jane Eyre and the idea of someone entering the book and actually talking to the characters seemed a fabulous one. It was original, interesting and, for fans of the story, absolutely irresistible.

In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë's novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde's ingenious fantasy-enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel--unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix.

The problem was that I started the book and other than some short references to Rochester there was no Jane Eyre in sight. The book first introduces us to Thursday Next, our heroine, who lives in an alternate reality with a very confusing family and a job that took me awhile to understand. I must admit that the fact that I was a bit lost for the first 200 pages didn't help one bit. I could see that Fforde has a huge imagination and lots of ideas that I liked but I'm afraid I couldn't keep up with him for most of the book. References to the Crimean War left me completely lost (was it easier for UK natives who probably heard about it a lot more than me?) and I'm also not familiar with Wordsworth works to understand what Thursday's aunt was doing on the poem nor with Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit to really appreciate the changes in the story. I can only guess how many other references escaped me... I thought the discussion on who wrote Shakespeare's plays was fun but the conclusion was a let down.

Fortunately after 200 pages we reach Jane Eyre! I loved it how Thursday entered the story in search of the bad guy and ultimately changed it to the ending we know and love. This part was really interesting and fun. All the things I thought the whole book would be and wasn't. Besides why is this called The Eyre Affair if only the last third of the book deals with Jane Eyre? It's like there were less loose ends in this last part and more of a continuity.

Grade: B- (just because I loved the Jane Eyre part so much)...less

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piraterie rated it:

09/25/07

bookshelves: read2007

Read in September, 2007

I had the same feeling after reading this as I had after reading The Looking Glass Wars. Fabulous idea, terrible execution. I was going to give it one more star than I gave that because it's not quite as badly written. And I liked the idea of door-to-door Baconians and Rocky Horrorized Richard III. But I changed my mind because the more I think about it, the more I didn't like it.

It was so smug and cutesy and in need of better editing. And it would have been better ...more

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Martine rated it:

(review of isbn 0340825766)

01/14/08

bookshelves: british, humour, modern-fiction, postmodern, science-fiction

Read in December, 2007

recommends it for: English lit buffs, Terry Pratchett fans

Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series is an awful lot of fun for English lit geeks who cherish their classics. It is set in an alternate England where people have cloned dodos for pets, croquet is the national sport, time travelling is a regular part of life and literature enjoys the kind of position that beer, football, cricket and TV have today, meaning that the country eats, drinks and breathes literature. It would be a perfect place to live, if it weren't for the fact that (1) it is run by a ...more

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Howard rated it:

(review of isbn 0670030643)

02/29/08

bookshelves: books-i-reviewed-for-kirkus

Read in January, 2001

An unusually assured first novel, this literary folly is a unique stew of fantasy, science fiction, procedural, and cozy literary mystery, but in the end is more dancing bear than ballet.

In an alternative Britain where literature is as important to the masses as movie stars are in our own, kids trade bubble-gum cards of Fielding characters, Baconians go door to door like Jehovah's Witnesses, preaching Francis Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare (while radical "New Marlovians" firebomb...more
An unusually assured first novel, this literary folly is a unique stew of fantasy, science fiction, procedural, and cozy literary mystery, but in the end is more dancing bear than ballet.

In an alternative Britain where literature is as important to the masses as movie stars are in our own, kids trade bubble-gum cards of Fielding characters, Baconians go door to door like Jehovah's Witnesses, preaching Francis Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare (while radical "New Marlovians" firebomb their meetings), and Richard III is weekly participatory theater, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Thursday Next, a veteran of the Crimean War veteran, still being fought after 100 years, is a LiteraTec, assigned to crimes such as stolen manuscripts, and, because time travel is common, very convincing forgeries. Her father, a renegade ChronoGuard, travels time fighting historical revisionists, occasionally visiting Thursday to check his progress ("Have you ever heard of someone named Winston Churchill?"). When Acheron Hades, whose supernatural powers make him the third most dangerous man in the world, steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and the Prose Portal, an invention allowing travel between literature and reality, he ransoms one of the minor characters; things get worse when he gets his hands on Jane Eyre. Thursday pursues Hades into the text of the novel (always a puzzlement to Bronte fans because of its oddly truncated ending, in which Jane never returns to Rochester), where she defeats him, and changes the story to the familiar happy ending. Back in her own world, Thursday marries her own true love, in scenes that parallel the novel she's just left, aided by characters she'd thought she'd left there.

While endlessly inventive, the invention here is more whim than whimsy (names like Jack Schitt, Millon de Floss, and Oswald Mandias get a grin, but no more), and the world Fforde's created lacks the integrity that makes the best fantasies both startling and enduring, but it's a welcoming and amusing place to pass a few hours.
...less

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Amanda rated it:

01/18/08

Read in January, 2008

recommended to Amanda by: Kristin
recommends it for: alternate history/science fiction fans, readers of classical literature

It took me a while to finish the book for various reasons, but in spite of that, I really enjoyed it. It's definitely a book for people who like crime/mystery novels and alternate history/science fiction novels, but who also have some knowledge of classical literature. Even though I haven't read Jane Eyre ("For shame!" you say), I was still able to follow this novel well because the author Fforde gives the reader great summaries in the form of dialog between the characters. W...more

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Skylar rated it:

01/04/08

bookshelves: fantasy, humor, literature, mystery

recommends it for: Lit majors who have lost the ability to read for pleasure

Imagine if Raymond Chandler melded with Douglas Adams to produce a sci-fi hardball detective mystery replete with literary references, and you'd have something like The Eyre Affair. The book takes place in a strange version of 1980's England, where the Crimean war has been going on for over hundred years, where Baconians knock on your door to try to convert you to their view of Shakespearean authorship, where a special operations squad exists explicitly to investigate literary crimes, and where...more

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Spudsie rated it:

07/10/08

Read in July, 2008

recommended to Spudsie by: Jim Smith
recommends it for: Anyone who appreciates British humor

What a fun concept! It's science fiction, literature, adventure, romance and time-traveling all in one. AND.....there's the classic dry British sense of humor.

What more could a gal ask for??

While I'm positive I missed some of the humor (since I live in "one of the colonies" instead of in the UK), I really enjoyed the dry humor I managed to spot throughout “The Eyre Affair.”

A fellow bookworm suggested I might enjoy this book after I submitted “Jane Eyre” for hi...more

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Laura rated it:

04/03/08

Read in April, 2008

I finished this book and really enjoyed it! It was very witty and funny. The characters included Thursday Next, Jack Schitt, Paige Turner, Victor Analogy, Acheron and Styx Hades, and the list goes on from there. It takes place in a surreal, futuristic version of 1985, although the book was written after that. (I'm guessing it's an allusion to the book 1984? Just a guess.) It takes place in London, but in this version of the world, people can enter books and the world between fiction and re...more

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Sara rated it:

02/22/08

bookshelves: fiction, i-own-these-books, read-w-book-club

Read in February, 2008

This is the first book in a series about Thursday Next. It takes place in a weird, 1985 sci-fi Britain. It took me about 200 pages to get into this book because some stuff was so strange. Actually, I could deal with most of the things that were strange to me (dodos brought back from extinction as pets, her dad somehow could pause time when he popped in to visit her out of thin air, etc. - all of this seemed normal to the characters), but I had a hard time with the stuff that was strange to th...more