Book Review

DIVING INTO BOOKS: THE EYRE AFFAIR

copyright 2003

Imagine a world slightly skewed from our own, a world in which the Crimean War is entering its 130th year with no resolution in sight, a world in which there are no jet planes but there are dirigibles, in which there are agencies so secret that other secret agents themselves don't know what those agencies are all about. Imagine a world with renegade time travelers and evil geniuses and formerly extinct animals used as pets. Imagine a world in which people can enter books they enjoy and hang around with the characters, possibly even altering the plots. You are imagining the world of The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde, one of the most enthralling books I have read in years.

Fforde's protagonist, Thursday Next (yes, that really is her name) is an operative at Special Operations, in the Literary Detection Division, which mostly involves detecting counterfeit books and stopping people from passing fraudulent first editions of classic books. Her father is a renegade ChronoGuard, with a tendency to stop time so that he can deliver a message or two to his daughter, among his other efforts to fix time.

The villain of the piece, Acheron Hades, is the third most evil person in the world (don't ask who the top two are; that's classified), and appears to be trying to steal first editions of classic books. At the beginning of The Eyre Affair, the manuscript of Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit has been stolen and although the Special Ops believe Hades was responsible, there's no proof, since he doesn't show up on film or tape. Thursday having had Hades as a professor years ago, and thus being able to identify him if she sees him (sometimes; Hades is able to disguise himself as just about anyone), she is called up to a higher level of Special Ops and finds herself in the middle of a plot to destroy English literature.

To tell more than that would be to spoil the plot, and the convoluted plot, involving gigantic evil corporations, actual bookworms, a somewhat different version of the Charge of the Light Brigade, an independent Wales, the question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays, an evil genius and the characters of Jane Eyre, is such fun that it would be criminal to detract from it.

Do you need to know about English literature or history to appreciate this book? Do you need to have read Jane Eyre to delight in the part Rochester plays in battling against Hades? No, on both counts, but you will enjoy the book all the more if you have at least a passing familiarity with great English literature and history. Anyone who knows the plot of Jane Eyre will love the alternate ending that Fforde presents, and the way the ending gets changed, but if you've ever seen the movie of Jane Eyre, you know enough to get the joke.

There are so many wonderful, funny concepts in the book that it's hard to choose which to highlight. Fforde has an almost Dickensian love of names: besides Thursday Next, there's Acheron Hades himself, Braxton Hicks, an evil character named Jack Schitt (really!), and a host of others. The almost throwaway idea of people having dodos as pets strikes me as wonderfully charming, as is the notion of traveling by dirigible rather than jet. Perhaps the most charming conceit of the book is the concept that people would be up in arms about changes to classic books. I'm not giving away too much when I say that a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit is stolen out of the book and killed, and there is a vast outpouring of grief. I would like to think that people care that much about books, but I have my doubts: ask any random person on the street who Martin Chuzzlewit even is, and I'd be surprised if you got one correct answer. Similarly, when Jane Eyre is threatened, in The Eyre Affair people rise up in protest, demanding action. Wouldn't it be wonderful if things were like that in the real world?

Dive in to The Eyre Affair, but clear yourself a block of time when you do, because this is one book you will not want to put down before you've reached the bizarre but entirely satisfying conclusion (which even settles, once and for all, that pesky question of who actually wrote Shakespeare's plays). Thursday Next's world is rich and fun, and I look forward to more of her adventures.

Kudos and thanks to my dear friend, Joanne C. Rutkowski, for turning me on to this delight of a book.