The Eyre Affair
April 12th 2007 05:40
'The Eyre Affair' was first published in 2001, and yielded an exciting new path into speculative fiction. Part comedy, part crime novel, part fantasy and part love note to classical literature, Jasper Fforde's debut novel couldn't have been more original or readable. It undoubtably left a few bookstores scratching their heads... I've seen it placed in the literature section almost as much as in the fantasy/sci-fi section. 'The Eyre Affair' is the first book in Fforde's Thursday Next series. A fifth novel in this series is due for release later this year.
It's 1985 in an alternative version of our planet. Where we idolise the stars of sport, music and film, the people in this reality worship literature - in particular, the names behind the classics... Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen and, of course, Bronte. The Crimean War rages on some 135 years after England and Russia first went to war over the penninsula, and Wales is a Socialist Republic, hidden from England behind an iron curtain. Enter Thursday Next, a willful and no-nonsense Crimean veteran who now serves in SpecOps as a LiteraTec. SpecOps is a covert heirarchy of various special groups who take care of cases too unusual or tricky for regular police... the branch that Thursday works within is mainly responsible for monitoring and policing the high volume of frauds, fakes and scams that proliferate the literature market. And so we have our set up.
Thursday is called upon to temporarily join a more secretive branch of SpecialOps to deal with an enigmatic man she once knew, Acheron Hades. He is listed as the third most dangerous man alive, bullets don't hurt him, and he commits heinous and villainous crimes just for the thrill of it. So when he steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and holds it to ransom, things begin to look pretty bad. And when you throw in the shady Goliath Corporation (who seem to have more power than the government), an escalating situation with Russia, and a valuable device that makes it possible to travel through the very barriers of fiction, it looks like it can only get worse.
This is a very fun book. The set up I just described is only the tip of the iceberg... the entire novel is jampacked with subplots and characters and fantastic left-field ideas. It's very clear that Fforde was setting himself up for a series of novels with this book as he introduces a huge cast of characters and one or two unresolved plotlines, it's a little distracting at first as you find it hard to keep track of who is who and whether they'll reappear in the novel or not, but once you get into the swing of things and just go along with it you tend not to care too much... I stopped worrying the moment I liked the book because I know I'll probably read the rest of the series now, and I'm sure I'll see all these characters again.
I have to admit, I probably would've enjoyed this book a bit more had I been more familiar with Jane Eyre or the classics in general. But rest assured, even with a minimal knowledge of these books, I still thoroughly enjoyed 'The Eyre Affair' so I guess a working knowledge isn't absolutely neccessary. The chief villain of the book, Acheron Hades, is a good foil for the heroine and I wish he'd featured a bit more extensively in the bulk of the text, or that the book's main plotline had incorporated him more heavily, but I guess that's just niggling. Anyway, I enjoyed this novel a lot... Jasper Fforde has his own sort of genre going on, but if I had to mention some other names he could sit next to on the bookshelf I'd probably say Robert Rankin, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams.
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