The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next, #1) in Overdue Podcast

Sep 28, 2014 Jason rated it liked it

Shelves: own

Think 'hardboiled genre' Vonnegut with a healthy splash of Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy with a focus on/tribute to classic literature.

Truly fun book. The style is easy and accessible without being dumbed-down. The plot is quick adventure science fiction, but familiar enough to be enjoyable to most everyone. Whimsical writing that sure is a bit hokey at times and the plot makes some rather convenient turns, but it's not meant to be high-brow literature, though it does pay tribute to Dickens Think 'hardboiled genre' Vonnegut with a healthy splash of Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy with a focus on/tribute to classic literature.

Truly fun book. The style is easy and accessible without being dumbed-down. The plot is quick adventure science fiction, but familiar enough to be enjoyable to most everyone. Whimsical writing that sure is a bit hokey at times and the plot makes some rather convenient turns, but it's not meant to be high-brow literature, though it does pay tribute to Dickens, Bronte, and Shakespeare. Don't take it too seriously, just sit back and enjoy the ride/read.

I feared that this book would just be more of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett and while Fforde is certainly playing in the same sandbox as them, he has a style of his own and he wrote a plot that was meaningful and had a satisfying resolution, it was not just a necessary vehicle for clever ridiculousness. (**side note: I really do enjoy Pratchett and to a lesser degree like Adams, but I don't find myself wanting to find more writers doing the same thing as either of them.)

The Eyre Affair is based in a 1985 parallel universe version of Great Britain, one where the Crimean War is ongoing, time travel and cloning extinct animals is common place, and the entire public appear to be strongly opinionated bibliophiles. There's enough of our own reality to keep the reader grounded, but enough variation to keep things interesting and fun. Our protagonist is a likeable female detective whose department is devoted to literature based crimes, she's playfully named Thursday Next. We follow Thursday as her job brings her face to face with a maniacal terrorist with some strange abilities that is bent on causing chaos and turning a profit. There is a love interest, some adorably awkward side-characters and some really clever touches that mirror the classic novel alluded to in the title that is in peril for the last third or so of the story.

Having read and really enjoyed Jane Eyre, I felt this book certainly benefited from that knowledge, but it's probably not completely necessary. For a good many chapters there are constant references to Dickens' Martin Chuzzelwit, I would like to read that and perhaps revisit this book at a later time just to see if I missed out on anything.

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Mar 14, 2016 Hyzie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

So the plot of this was moderately convoluted and things wrapped up a bit quickly at the end, and the entirety of it was sometimes a bit difficult to take entirely seriously, but I really loved this.

This universe is a place I would love to live. Everybody in it loves books. Literary topics are almost the default conversation. Everyone has an opinion on the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. The plot hinges, rather evidently from the title, on Jane Eyre. Somehow, none of this comes across as pre So the plot of this was moderately convoluted and things wrapped up a bit quickly at the end, and the entirety of it was sometimes a bit difficult to take entirely seriously, but I really loved this.

This universe is a place I would love to live. Everybody in it loves books. Literary topics are almost the default conversation. Everyone has an opinion on the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. The plot hinges, rather evidently from the title, on Jane Eyre. Somehow, none of this comes across as pretentious, which is tricky when we are dealing rather exclusively with classics. Literature isn't just serious business (and in this world "defending the canon" takes on a whole new meaning), it's also casual fun.

Tuesday herself was fun to read about. She sometimes rushed in where it was foolish, and her romance issues were, as is common, almost entirely of her own making (though they were a minor point, so that is ignorable), but she shouldered on through a host of work-related mishaps, horrible people doing horrible things, and a family that rather defies description. She showed a hefty chunk of common sense, which is often more unusual in books than it ought to be, and pulled everything together in the end.

The plot did get a touch...tangled. It occasionally felt like there were more ideas the author wanted to toss in than really space for things, and there are a number of weird almost-but-not-quite side plots that aren't really explained (Tuesday's father? What on earth is going on there?) or are used as punch lines rather than actually explored. In a lot of ways, the main plot doesn't really get going for quite a hefty chunk of the book, despite the main antagonist getting set up pretty early on.

This sort of feels like what might happen if Monty Python met Doctor Who and they decided to write a love letter to literature together. It honestly probably had flaws I'm not even noting here simply because when faced with everything about this book that I loved, they paled so far in comparison as to be invisible on a first read-through. At any rate, I'll definitely be continuing on with the series, and I can't wait to see what happens next. ...more

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