Demensions - Book Review: The Eyre Affair

Great Britain circa 1985: time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. Based on an imaginary world where time and reality bend in the most convincing and original way since Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Eyre Affair is a delightful rabbit hole of a read: once you fall in you may never come back.

From the back cover

Rarely do I quote the promotional text of a novel I've read, even to close friends. I've always thought it pretentious for one, people should make up their own minds for seconds, and that they asked for my opinion, not that of the promotions department of whatever publishing house originated the piece. However, in the case of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, my response is a resounding "Hooray!" Indeed, not since Douglas Adams first destroyed the Earth, sending Arthur and company flinging toward The Restaurant at the End of the Universe have I had so much fun reading a book.

Here's an expansion of the premise outlined above: Our heroine is Thursday Next --already, the lips of your mouth are curving in a smile, aren't they? She's a member of SpecOps, specifically S0-27, the Literary Detective Division. Since this version of England practically builds religions around classic (and not so classic) literature, Thursday spends most of her time tracking down forgeries and other literary criminal activity. Boring -- or is it?

Not at all when you consider her father, Colonel Next, is a renegade member of the ChronoGuard (SO-12) and pops up from time to time with questions about all manner of history that someone may be tampering with. Or how about the theft of Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit by a man named Acheron Hades who nearly seduced our femme fatale in her college days? The fact that nothing seems to be able to kill him, that he has incredible powers of persuasion, and perhaps a few other, supernatural talents all send Next -- and the reader -- on one of the most amazing science/fantasy rides of recent memory.

Next and Hades are the best pair of nemeses (hopefully, that's the plural) to come along in some time. Thursday is so much a not-quite bookwormish Emma Peel and Hades so over-the-top evil, that you can't help smirking at nearly every passage. Next is brash, independent and, above all, righteous -- the exact opposite of the brash, independent, and utterly morally corrupt Hades. They are twisted mirror images, dancing around each other, into and out of the strangest situations put to paper. As the title would indicate, the focus of the conflict is on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a book that Thursday actually fell into as a child. Apparently, the walls between her reality and a dimension where the novel's characters live and breathe have gotten, er, paper thin. In fact, Thursday later learns that there's even a travel agency dedicated to such jaunts -- luckily, there's only a few people with the ability, though.

But it's when her Uncle Mycroft (a nod, perhaps, to Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes?) creates a device that can send anybody into any piece of written work -- a poem, a technical paper, or novel -- that Hades' plans kick into high gear and get Next chasing after him, at one point temporarily working for the even more mysterious SO-5. Once Hades gets his hands on Mycroft's device, he plucks a minor character out of the original Chuzzlewit manuscript and kills him, forever altering every copy of the novel ever printed. What, then, could be more dastardly, then plucking Jane Eyre herself out of Bronte's manuscript and killing off one of Britain's most beloved characters?

All this reality-twisting action is set against a, well, rather reality-twisting backdrop. Thursday has one of those pet dodos, named Pickwick, who plocks his affection for his mistress. Her ex-lover, Landen Park-Laine, has reappared in her life, forcing her to confront their roles, and that of her deceased brother, Anton, in the now hundred years-plus Crimea War against Russia. Long-range transportation is conducted by airships (yes, the Hindenberg variety), not airplanes and yet people have cell phones and pagers. Operations against vampires and werewolves are routine, as are the attempts to fix sudden rips in the space-time continuum. And the literature! People are so in love with Shakespeare that they put on audience-participation performances of Richard Ill and hundreds of people rename themselves John Milton (even women).

Even other characters' names are fun: Jack Schitt is the infuriating representative of the Goliath Corporation, a company who has basically taken over every aspect of English society and government; Victor Analogy, Bowden Cable, and Braxton Hicks are all members of SO-27 that Next ends up working with. There's even a vampire hunter (with a little problem of his own) named "Spike" Stoker.

This is just a taste of what you'll find when you crack open the front cover and dive into the world Fforde has so lovingly, carefully, and laughingly detailed. And, on top of that, there's even a series of websites devoted to Thursday, her Britain's ubiquitous Goliath Corporation, and much more. You might want to get started at www.thursdaynext.com and try -- just try -- to work your way from there. For those of you who were caught up in this year's online A.l.: Artificial Intelligence web mystery, the websites are a great extension of the book -- especially since the book ends, well, rather, so well.

You'll understand what I mean when you read The Eyre Affair. Let's just say that some literary characters who have a life of their own decide to do their "real-life" heroine a favor or two.

Here's hoping Fforde isn't done with Next and that the next Next novel comes around the corner real soon. Of course, with Colonel Next's help, that could have been yesterday.

Book Review: The Eyre Affair

written by Jasper Fforde

Review by Martin L. Cahn