The Eyre Affair

I cannot give this book enough stars! The Eyre Affair was such a terrific read I cannot stop passing it off to friends and family, desperate to have someone else to talk about it with! Jasper Fforde has crafted a brilliant, quirky, hilarious yet deeply serious novel that I was excited to pick up in my free time. From the crazy names (Acheron Hades, Thursday Next, Oswald Mandias, Braxton Higgs, Landen Parke-Laine) to the literary world that is alternate 1985. Marlovians constantly bringing into question the legitimacy of Shakespeares claim to his plays, the intellectual discussions throughout the novel about the possible authors and how Shakespeare could not possibly be the man who penned them felt like a spirited discussion from Uni show more where alternatives were discussed and not immediately derided.

Following Thursday (which I did not realize was a name, first of all until page 3 and a girl, second of all, until page 5) through the dizzying literary scene is great fun. While there is an underlying darkness in the Crimean War background, the division of Great Britain and the PTSD that she carries with her from the loss of her brother Anton and, as a result, her fiance Landen, the novel stays light and comical and quirky and delightfully odd. Ffordes imagination is boundless. From the Prose Portal to the book worms and their apostrophe farts I was endlessly entertained. The pages where the book worms are wreaking grammatical havoc was a challenge to read, as it turns out we really are very much trained to read a certain way by punctuation, but hilarious and so very clever.

We get to see a different side of Edward Rochester, of Jane Eyre and get to imagine the displeasure of an ending that is different than the one we've grown up reading. We get to see the manipulation of a story from inside of itself and the outward result across the world. The outcry as the novel is altered and the vast effect it has on readers. And we get to fret over the Raven and it's fate as we close.

I am looking forward to picking up the rest of the series and continuing on with Thursday and the gang for another flawlessly written adventure. show less

In an alternate 1985, Crimean war veteran Thursday Next works for Special Operations division 27, also known as LiteraTec. She’s assigned to investigate the disappearance of the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, stolen by the amoral and manipulative villain Acheron Hades. It goes very badly, and Thursday decides to move back to her hometown (with encouragement by a visit from her future self). There she has to contend with her judgmental family members, running into her ex-boyfriend, and confronting the death of her best friend/brother in the war 15 years earlier. But Hades’ goal is maximum chaos, so he quickly moves on to the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, harassing Jane via Thursday’s kidnapped show more uncle and his wacky invention that allows people to travel into books.

How do you review a book that feels so formative to your life? It’s a lot more police-y than I remember; Thursday is constantly shooting her gun in crowded areas, even after it’s established that guns don’t hurt Acheron Hades. This book can be read and enjoyed without being familiar with Jane Eyre, but there’s a LOT to pick up on if you are. The wedding scene is obvious, but there’s also the subtler aspects of Thursday fleeing Swindon after a trauma but returning when she gets a mysterious visitation, and Landon having been injured. All of the bits and pieces that I know will thrill me in later books are here already (time travel paradoxes, pet dodos, Rocky Horror Richard III, wacky inventions, ancillary vampires, incredibly goofy character names (I still think of this book every time I hear the words “Braxton-Hicks”), etc.), but they aren’t yet being used to their fullest extent. I still loved it, and that gives me something to look forward to. show less

Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair is a fantasy set in our (somewhat re-imagined) real world. Thursday Next works in SO-27, the British Special Operations division that deals with literary crimes. Thursday has been in her fairly routine Literatec job for eight years, investigating copyright violations and tracking down fake first editions. But things are about to change when criminal mastermind Acheron Hades comes up with a plot far worse than the usual ransom/extortion jobs. What if someone could go in and change what happens in a book's original manuscript — and thus change every copy on the planet? What price the classics?

Fforde has fun with both alternate history (England and Russia are still fighting in the Crimea, Wales is show more Communist, complete with a Welsh Politburo, etc.) and alternate literary endings (with Jane Eyre having quite a different ending from the one we know). Some readers complain that you won't get half the jokes in this book without a degree in English literature, and while that may be true, I found the frequent literary allusions easy to follow even if I hadn't read the source yet. Some of the humor comes from puns, especially with the characters' names ("Paige Turner" comes to mind). Other characters' names give big hints about what they do (Spike Stoker, the vampire hunter, is one of my favorites).

Fforde reveals Thursday's character slowly as she narrates the story, and this is very effective. She will mention things in her past that have made her the way she is, but we only get the full histories bit by bit, as needed. I found that this technique really enhanced my understanding of the character, as I didn't learn all about her in one big info-dump at the beginning. Thursday is at once both very tough and very vulnerable, and it's quite intentional that she reminds the reader of Jane Eyre. Fforde even has Thursday give a précis of Brontë's famous story to a co-worker.. incidentally filling in any readers who may not have read it (yet).

Mixed up in all the action are conversations and allegations about who REALLY wrote all those plays attributed to Shakespeare. I guess this is a hot topic among Literatecs! Various characters espouse the Baconian or Marlovian theories and discuss them at length throughout the story, and I found it quite informative, as I am not overly educated on the literary conspiracy theories of the Elizabethan era. At the end Fforde makes it pretty clear that the whole Shakespeare tangle will feature in the next book. Should be fun!

I listened to this on audiobook and it was a mixed experience. On one hand, Elizabeth Sastre's voice and narrative style are a pleasure to listen to, and she really was the reason I persevered in this audiobook. But on the other hand, this reading is "slightly abridged." This makes my inner purist cringe; who defines "slightly"? What did I miss? Is is ever ethical to cut an author's work and present it under the same title — really? And if you're going to abridge something "slightly," what's the point in abridging it at all? Maybe there is a good reason, but I can't think of what it might be (I'm open to being enlightened though!). And as if the black mark of abridgment wasn't enough, the library copy I borrowed had a lot of scratches on the discs, resulting in lots of skips and blips in the listening experience. If Sastre wasn't such fun to listen to, I would definitely have dropped this audiobook in favor of the printed original. The narrator makes or breaks the experience, no question.

One thing I didn't like was the profanity. There is some cursing in the dialogue as well as a character whose name is a swear word (at least, it's pronounced that way). While this may not be quite so bad in print, it's far more intrusive in an audiobook. I disliked the disconnect between Sastre's clear, pleasant voice and the foul words she was saying.

There are so many ridiculous, fantastic things in this alternate England that Fforde has created — and the reader accepts them without question because they just work. Will Speak machines that dispense snippets of recorded Shakespeare for tenpence. A whole division of Spec. Ops., the Chrono Guard, that travels through time to arrange things. An underfunded department that deals with the powers of darkness (vampires and werewolves). I think all of it works because it's so matter of fact, placed alongside everyday stuff like office politics, breakups, and bad war memories. Underneath all the silliness the characters feel like real people and I found myself caring about their fate.

Overall, I really enjoyed this little romp and can't wait to read the rest of the series. Good fun! show less

I love the fantastic residing amid the mundane--day to day life with the spike of the amazing running through it. This is either why I love the old Twilight Zones or this was inspired in me by watching old Twilight Zones...possibly a chicken and egg question. In THE EYRE AFFAIR, Fforde creates a world where the fantastic is often mundane and only something more fantastic can top it. At once a procedural thriller, sci-fi adventure and romantic fantasy--I enjoyed the elements but did not always feel it was cohesive. Being able to literally enter the world of a book and interact with its characters has been appealing to me since watching Gumby and Pokey as a tyke and that aspect of the story is handled quite well--though it takes too long show more to get there. I enjoyed the ride until then, many literary puns and allusions, but I really wanted to love this book--maybe I let my expectations get in the way. In the meantime, there are secret government agencies and literary cults involved in great crimes--career upheaval and great villains. Thursday Next, the main character/narrator, more than holds your interest but many of the good guy characters were kinda flat (including her love interests) and others that seemed ripe disappeared completely for a hundred pages. I was interested in one closeted werewolf in particular who was completely wasted. I suspect he was saved for a future book--but such a juicy introduction left me distracted by his absence. The quibbles I have are mostly redeemed by the creation of a unique world where literature is the driving force in most people's lives and the arrival of a marvelous villain and where he ends up at the end of the book. Quite enjoyable and still interested in reading further adventures--maybe the next chapter will knock my socks off. This one knocked off my shoes and loosened my socks just a little.... show less

What I love about books is the mystery and the suspense. I love meeting characters who are more complicated and have more depth than some people I know in real life. And I LOVE good writing.

The Eyre Affair has it all.

Jasper Fforde is a genius, mixing the elements of a contemporary fiction/mystery story with science fiction to create a world that is at once familiar and strikingly different. It took me a while to get adjusted to this new world, where the Crimean war still rages on, and where forging Byronic verse is a serious offense and literature and art are highly prized by all. However, after 30 pages, I was fully involved in the story, flipping pages almost faster than I could read.

The characters are easy to relate to, and Thursday show more is everything I look for in a female protagonist. She's funny, resourceful, and doesn't let anybody boss her around or intimidate her. The fact that she seems to be way in over her head on this case makes it all the better. I like how she is forced to deal not only with hunting down a seemingly-invincible villain who has kidnapped her relatives and is about to change Martin Chuzzlewit and Jane Eyre forever, but also with her past and the death of her brother in the Crimean War.

The only problem I had with The Eyre Affair is that the ending is wrapped up a little too perfectly a little too quickly. After all that happened before, it just didn't work for me. I'm a fan of nicely tied-up endings, but I like them to be realistic.

This is a book for book lovers (and who of us doesn't love books?!). It makes more sense if you have some knowledge of history and classics in general, but it's really not necessary. I definitely recommend giving The Eyre Affair a try. show less

If, like me, you just read about anything and everything and geek out about literature and spend about 85% of your time surrounded by books, then you have either read this book by now, and if you haven’t, you should. It’s an extremely meta book, so I can understand why some people might not get “it” or latch on to it, but I love this book.

The world-building has shades of subtlety worked into it—it’s slightly steampunk, along with the alternate 1985 and in-universe mentions of the still-ongoing Crimean War and the state of England. (Honestly, I did not even realize that zeppelins were widely used until this reread.) The fact that tampering with literature is a crime punishable by death is a big honkin’ clue to just how show more vastly different this universe is. Which leads into the hilarious meta-aspect of the book. I was an English major, I am all about LITERATURE IS SRS BZNS. I love the different fringe groups devoted to various authors of British canon; the Shakespeare-ghostwriter theories not only run rampant, but the theorists backing Bacon are the equivalent to Jehovah’s Witnesses; and there is a literary tourism industry that takes you to famous fictional locales. (Also, ROCKY HORROR-STYLE SHAKESPEARE. I WOULD PAY TO DO THIS.) There’s a lot of winking and nods to various authors that range between the blatantly obvious (such as the hotel desk clerk, Liz Barret-Browning) to mere nods (Shakespeare’s Christopher Sly and why he never shows up beyond one act).

Plotwise, events move quickly, switching between rapid action and the lengthier, slower comedy and satire. The general mystery of why Acheron Hades steals the Prose Portal is set up and revealed early on, but a lot of the book’s tension comes from whether or not Thursday will be able to catch up with Hades, and how exactly she plans to beat him. There’s a lot going on in the subplots, with Thursday’s reconciliation of her ex-fiance, Landen, and the intervention of the Goliath Corporation with the aforementioned Crimea, but Fforde manages to streamline all of the plotlines without being overbearing.

I generally like Thursday. She’s intelligent, with her moments of brash thinking and stupid bravery—which actually has consequences that she has to deal with later. Her ability to jump into various manuscripts is never fully explained, but it’s revealed that she’s not the only one to do this, I liked her building a rapport with the various characters from Jane Erye. (Which is another thing I loved, Thursday actually details the months she spends in-text, but it’s mentioned that in her world, it’s only as long as someone reads the book. My one issue with her characterization is that she falls back on the unmarried singleton who “let Landen get away” and resorts to referring to her two-dimensional rival as a ‘fat cow.’ It just felt like she had to fulfill that particular trope, and while I like her rapport with Landen, if felt like they ended up together for the sake of the plot. Also, her reconciliation with him, specifically in regards to his damning testimony of Thursday’s brother, just came off as too easy. It’s mentioned that it’s been years since they’ve seen each other, but Thursday has never once considered the reasons why Landen did what he had to do until her brother mentions it. As I said, easy plot convenience.

The other characters range between being enjoyable to somewhat clichéd. I like Thursday’s Uncle Mycroft and his mad science experiments (I want a set of bookworms. And a Prose Portal, of course) and he’s got a relaxed chemistry with his wife, Polly. I wasn’t a huge fan of Thursday’s mother, and for the small amount that he shows up, I did enjoy her other brother Joffy. Acheron Hades is a little harder to pin down—he feels like the even more evil and megalomaniac version of Zaphod Beeblebrox. It feels intentional at times, but then again, Hades’s character goes a little too over-the-top at times. (And given the extreme meta of the book, it feels really intentional.) I liked Thursday’s co-operatives at the Swindon Litera-Tec; everyone gets just enough detail to feel fully fleshed out without weighing down the plot. I even enjoyed the slightly further developed character of Mr. Rochester that pops up in the book—I didn’t like him in Jane Eyre proper, but here, it seems like he’s playing up his idealized characterization that people swoon over.

As I said earlier, this book is heavily meta’d., so I understand why some people might not gel to it immediately. I do love the book—it’s not perfect, but the nods and references to literary canon are highly amusing, and it keeps me on my toes with its humor and fast plot. show less

I love this book, with its odd cultural reimaginings. A London where the rennaissanceists and the baroqueists team up in alliance against the post-impressionist street gangs; where Richard III is performed Rocky Horror style with audience participation and callbacks; and where you can travel not only in time but in the universe of books.

Evil dude breaks into Jane Eyre and holds the heroine hostage? Yup, that's our plot and our heroine Thursday Next must fix it. It's wonderful imaginative stuff, with a rattling good adventure pace and great gobs of British quirk and charm.

This was a re-read for me, over Xmas. It was good fun this time to see foreshadowing of later novels in the series. There is casual mention of the unscrambled eggs show more recipe... *dramatic music* show less