This is Jasper Fforde.
That means it's silly, not necessarily groundbreaking, but certainly satirical, dark-edged, referential and post-modern in ways that will only work if you're capable of tripping lightly along in his wake, enjoying the view and grinning wryly at the social commentary and broader themes he's sketching on the horizon for you.

I always find the start of a new Fforde novel a bit like that first dive into cold water on a warm day. It's shocking and disorientating, especially at first, so you just have to close your eyes, keep going, and soon you find you're getting along so well in this new environment that you feel comfortable with it, even with those shadowy depths beneath you that you do not yet know anything about, and may never know. Like those watery spaces filled with possible fish, Fforde always conveys a sense of a fully realised world ticking away behind the main action and that's certainly true in the whimsical, frightening world of Eddie Russett, when he find himself confronted by a man who's wrong-spotted, somewhere in the middle of a plot that turns out to involve the government and society as a whole. As Eddie stumbles about uncovering more of the truth about his world, we're dragged along too, catching the same puzzle-pieced conversations and bits of information about just what's going on.

Fforde does tend towards stereotypes as support characters, but his dyads of protagonists do include tough, nuanced and interesting women, which always works for me, too. Jane is no exception, and the relationship between her and Eddie owes a lot to the noir genre, where the woman holds the knowledge necessary for the clueless male to fully realise what's going on. I enjoy this, though I think the characterisation worked better when we were viewing the story from the woman's perspective (as in Thursday Next's arc) rather than as a guy seeing a woman as (yet again) a total cypher.