The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next Novels (Penguin Books))
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde’s outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard.
Fforde’s heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable–someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example–a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text–against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens’ novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation’s most beloved novel–an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre–and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester’s Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.
Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine’s utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. —Roz Kaveney
Wonderful escapist nonsense in an alternative England where the Crimean …,
Daft, but enjoyable daft.,
Thoroughly enjoyable,
Well its not. It is funny, real laugh out loud stuff. Jasper Fforde is a clever writer, and his humour keeps you reading page after page of this book.
The novel centres around a woman named Thursday Next, ex-forces, now a book detective, more or less anyway. She is a strong character, and very human, something which i feel is missing from many detective novels, which is evident when Thursday returns to Swindon to rejoin her family. Her time travelling father provides quite a few funny moments, specially the banana bit, i almost dropped my book in the bath at that point.
The story itself is one i never thought i would read, its a bit different to what im used to, but that was part f the fun, i didnt know what to expect from one page to the next. You instantly like the characters, even the bad guys, Acheron Hades is one sick puppy, but he has some of the best lines in this book.
I am not much of a book reviewer i know that, but the book should do all the talking anyway, it really is a good one and i highly recommend it to anyone who likes a bit of sillyness now and then.
As luck would have it, Lost In A Good Book just arrived through my door, which i shall pick up to read shortly =)