The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next, #1) in The Complete Idiots Guide to the Ultimate Reading List

Jul 04, 2010 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it liked it

Shelves: novels, fantasy, literary-fiction, crime, fiction, mystery, ultimate-reading-list, romance, science-fiction, humor-and-comedy

I liked this and I'm glad I read this--but I expected to love it, and I didn't and won't be reading more of Fforde. The book has a fantastic core premise: fictional characters can drop into the real world and intervene in lives; real people can drop into works of fiction and refashion the story. The heroine, Thursday Next, is a member of Special Operations 27--"LiteraTec" which usually deals with crimes such as forgery, copyright infringement, and bad acting. (An actor can be arrested for an una I liked this and I'm glad I read this--but I expected to love it, and I didn't and won't be reading more of Fforde. The book has a fantastic core premise: fictional characters can drop into the real world and intervene in lives; real people can drop into works of fiction and refashion the story. The heroine, Thursday Next, is a member of Special Operations 27--"LiteraTec" which usually deals with crimes such as forgery, copyright infringement, and bad acting. (An actor can be arrested for an unapproved rendition of Shakespeare.) In the Eyre Affair she's on the heels of a criminal mastermind who is murdering and kidnapping fictional characters--including the beloved Jane Eyre.

This isn't the only narrative strand--the novel is set in an alternate universe where a lot of the history we know happened differently. (Time travel is a fact in this world and the timeline it seems continually tweaked by operatives.) In this novel the Crimean War has been going on for 131 years--Thursday is a veteran of that war and it pops up and intertwines in the plot in a clever way. There's also text-eating bookworms, extinct creatures brought back to life to be made into pets--like Thursday's dodo--productions of Richard III that have run for 15 years with the audience shouting out lines as if it were The Rocky Horror Picture Show and people debate questions of literary text and authorship with all the fervor of religious disputes.

The book should be a bibliophile's dream with a wealth of literary allusion and word play: a blurb from The Wall Street Journal on the cover calls it a blend of "Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawkings and Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Maybe that's the problem for me. It's too manic--too many disparate elements thrown at me even if a great deal of the threads come together at the end. Maybe it's just that I can never quite disappear into this world. Harry Potter is easier. Believe that you can pass through a barrier at Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross Station into a world of witches and wizards and you're pretty OK from there. People still act like people. But a world where literature is cared about with such zeal is harder for me to credit.

I also don't feel the book is well-written. Almost all of The Eyre Affair is written in first person, but there are patches of third person and third-person like narration and it's not transitioned well. I remember as particularly clunky a scene where Thursday talks about her encounter with her nemesis, Hades Archeron, and other parts of the narrative seem clumsy as well.

It's an imaginative story, well-plotted, and I liked Thursday Next, the main narrator of the story. Yet somehow, I found too much of this novel a chore to read to recommend enthusiastically nor do I want to follow more of Thursday's adventures. ...more

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Nov 18, 2008 Jamie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy, fiction

What a wonderfully funny book! I really enjoyed the adventures of Thursday Next and her loveable but eccentric family and friends. I have Lost in a Good Book awaiting on Mt TBR so I need to get it read now. I loved all of the literary "in" jokes and way Fforde made Richard III the Rocky Horror Picture Show of its time. A warning though...Do NOT read this and try and drink something at the same time! I nearly choked myself to death on a glass of water when I got to that part. ...more

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Dec 29, 2008 Jeff rated it really liked it

Very clever alternate world in which literature is valued much higher than in current history. Some hilarious references to other books test your literary depth. Fforde's is very deep. ...more

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