The Eyre Affair
by Jasper Fforde

reviewed by Byron Merritt

The Eyre Affair is equal parts fantasy, alternate history, science fiction, romance, and, oh yes, zany comedy (think of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meeting Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and you’ll be close).

The reader begins their journey into The Eyre Affair through the eyes of the feisty LiteraTech, Thursday Next. LiteraTech? Oh yes. Remember, this is an alternate history, and it starts in 1985 England where the Crimean War has been raging against the Imperial Russian Army for over 130 years, and Wales is an independent state. Literature is taken VERY seriously here—you can go to jail for misquoting Byronic verses, and Baconian enthusiasts go door-to-door in an attempt to discredit Shakespeare. Everyone is “into” the classics here (so much so that the LiteraTechs are part of an extensive police force), and one man, Acheron Hades, has seized Ms. Next’s “mad as pants” uncle and appropriated his device known as ‘The Prose Portal’. This allows its owner to fall into the actual story of a book. And if the owner of the Prose Portal has the original manuscript, he or she can change the story completely. Oh the horrors! When Hades steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens, and kills one of the minor characters, all hell breaks loose.

Thursday Next is on the job! She’s one of the few people who actually knows what Hades looks like and has survived several of his “attacks”. Along our way to capture Mr. Hades, we meet some interesting characters and find out that a new terror has been conducted against literature by the evil man: Hades has stolen the original Jane Eyre manuscript and taken Jane Eyre out of it!  Whoa! Can Thursday Next conquer such a dastardly villain? You won’t know until the final page.

Lots of accolades have been thrown upon this book, and I have to admit that I enjoyed it immensely (the characters, the alternate reality, the literary references, all added to my enjoyment of the story). It’s also a very breezy read. If you’re looking for light-as-air reading material, you couldn’t go wrong here. But being a writer myself, I couldn’t help but notice that Mr. Fforde (the author) starts the book in a first person narrative and occasionally switches to third person. Although some authors do this intentionally (for story flow, etc.), I felt here that the author did it more for the plot than to aid the flow of the story. It left me feeling a bit cheated. Maybe English writing styles differ from those of us in the States, though.

Even so, a fun book to be sure. The layers of comedy are bound to tickle your funny bone.