The Eyre Affair by Jasper FfordePenguin Books, 2003 (Originally Hodder and Stoughton, 2001)

In 1985 in the alternate England in which The Eyre Affair takes place, time travel is possible, the Crimean War has been going on for 131 years, Wales is independent, and classic English literature is a very big deal. Our heroine, Thursday Next, is a LiteraTec (Literary Detective): a special agent whose department investigates manuscript thefts and forgeries. Near the start of the book, Thursday gets called to the scene of a major crime: the manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit has been stolen. The suspect turns out to be one Acheron Hades, an uber-villain who was once a university professor: Thursday’s called to the case because she was his student and knows what he looks like. Hades is not just a master criminal: he has some extraordinary powers, including the ability to “hear his own name—even whispered—over a thousand-yard radius, perhaps more” (26). He also doesn’t show up on film or video, can stop bullets with his bare hands, and has “amazing persuasive powers over those of weak mind” (27). So what does Hades want with the manuscript? Is it money he wants, or does he have something more devious planned? In her investigations, Thursday has a near-death experience and gets entangled with a massive corporation who also would like to find Hades; her genius inventor uncle gets drawn into the story, too, because of his latest invention, the Prose Portal, which lets its user enter a piece of literature. But the Prose Portal isn’t the only way into a book, as Thursday herself can attest: in this world, it seems that the “barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning” (206).

As it turns out, what Hades is interested in is a particular kind of extortion: he kidnaps and kills a minor character from Martin Chuzzlewit and threatens to do worse. He ends up stealing the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, too, and removing Jane herself from the novel’s pages, which of course means Thursday has to figure out how to get Jane back into the novel.

The tone of the book is funny, by which I mean both humorous and odd: it sometimes reads like a parody of hard-boiled detective novels, sometimes it’s all puns and silly wordplay (character names include Paige Turner and Jack Schitt), and it can’t seem to decide whether it’s a first-person narrative limited to Thursday’s experiences or not. Some of the moments of humor tied to the world-building Fforde has done are great: I love that in Thursday’s world, people have pet dodos (they’ve been revived from extinction via DIY cloning kits), people who think Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays try to proselytize door to door like Jehovah’s Witnesses, and there are audience-participation Rocky Horror Picture Show-style productions of Richard III. I love that there is a riot at a pub when a of Raphaelites and a group of neosurrealists clash, and that the scene includes this:

The demonstrators outside chanted Italian Renaissance slogans and then stones and missiles were thrown. The neosurrealists responded by charging the lines protected by large soft watches and seemed to be winning until the police moved in. (120)

Despite the humor being lots of fun, this book wasn’t quite for me: it’s very plot-driven, which is not my favorite thing, and the writing is sometimes clunky: twice the word “remiss” is wrongly used when it should be “amiss,” and I found myself wondering how many times the word “grunted” was used to describe someone’s reply in a conversation (ten, which maybe doesn’t seem like that many, but I found it grating). I also had moments of annoyance at the characterization of Thursday: as Michiko Kakutani puts it in her review in The New York Times, “Thursday is part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew and part Dirty Harry,” and I maybe could have done without the Bridget Jones-ish bits, like when Thursday makes negative comments about other women’s weights (I don’t think she comments on any guys’ bodies in similar ways).