The Eyre Affair is Jasper Fforde's first novel. On the
basis of this book, Terry Pratchett, the late Douglas Adams & Tom Holt
at their very best, have a serious rival for the crown of SF & F
Humour. The story is set in an alternate universe where Wales is a soviet
republic, Dodos are available in home-cloning kits, the Crimean War is 131
years old, and the ending of Jane Eyre is less than satisfactory
(she goes off to India with the missionary St John Rivers).
The heroine of the Eyre Affair is Thursday Next, who works for Special
Operations Dept 27 (SO-27) the Literacy Detectives whose task is to chase
criminals who steal or forge first editions of famous works. "The
Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties
considered either too unusual or too specialised to be tackled by the
regular force. There were 30 departments in all, starting at the more
mundane Neighbourly Disputes (SO-30), and going on to Literacy Detectives
(SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24) ... The Chronoguard were SO-12 and
Counterterrorism SO-9."
Thursday Next has an eccentric family, to say the least. Her disgraced
father who works for the Chronoguard has been edited out of existence. Her
uncle is an inventor, of note are his inventions of the 2B pencil with a
built in spell checker, and the Retinal Screen Saver - very useful for
boring jobs. However, his greatest claim to fame is the Prose Portal which
enables people to step into poetry, for example the Wordsworth poems and
talk to the great man. This invention is driven by Hyperbookworms. He has
bred these with a few 100 strands of DNA encoding all the finest
dictionaries, lexicons and thesauri. Thursday's job is to bring to justice
men like the fiendish Acheron Styx who enters Dickens manuscripts, and
abducts minor characters for ransom, and ultimately for execution and
extinction - because in this world, if you alter the original manuscript
you alter every copy of the book.
You don't have to know Jane Eyre intimately (the book that is) to
enjoy The Eyre Affair, but it does help to show how clever this book is.
Needless to say, the climax (of both books) occurs on the roof of Mr
Rochester's Thornfield Hall amid the flames. An excellent ingenious first
novel, buy it immediately. |