SALON

Thursday, Jan 24, 2002 10:11 PM UTC

“The Eyre Affair” by Jasper Fforde

In an alternate 1985, intrepid literary detective Thursday Next battles an arch-villain who's kidnapping characters from classic literature.

By

Topics: Books,

The place is England and the year is 1985, but it’s not any version of 1985 that you or I would recognize. Sure, some aspects of everyday life are familiar enough — people drive Datsuns and watch television, for example. But microchips haven’t been invented, so there are no computers, and people make long trips by dirigible rather than jet plane. Time travel, on the other hand, is possible, although highly regulated. The Russian Revolution never happened, but for 131 years Britain and Czarist Russia have been fighting the Crimean War, a conflict in which long, relatively inactive periods are punctuated by episodes of horrendous carnage.

Oh, and art and literature are popular — very popular. In fact, they share about the same cultural import that movies, professional sports and pop music — combined — do in our world. Hardcore fans change their names to John Milton or go around dressed like Shakespeare, and gangs of surrealists get into lethal rumbles with French impressionists.

This is the 1985 inhabited by Thursday Next, intrepid Special Operative in literary detection, veteran of a particularly bloody Crimean campaign (where she lost a brother) and the kind of tough, self-reliant heroine that fans of Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski series will recognize even if Welsh author Jasper Fforde’s alternate history high jinks set their heads spinning. And since Fforde drops a sly hint that “The Eyre Affair” is intended to launch a new series, readers who take a liking to Thursday will no doubt find more where that came from.

Thursday’s job is to track down stolen original manuscripts and spot forgeries, but in “The Eyre Affair” she gets recruited by another department in SpecOps, which is trying to capture the world’s Third Most Wanted criminal, Acheron Hades. It turns out Thursday is one of the few people able to resist the hypnotic effect of Hades’ infernally persuasive voice. Hades steals a device that allows people to enter into literary works, and he begins kidnapping characters from great novels, starting with a minor figure from “Martin Chuzzlewit” and moving on to Jane Eyre.

There’s a bit of back story about Thursday’s dead brother, her burgeoning pacificism and a lost love she encounters when she transfers back to her hometown, Swindon, but “The Eyre Affair” is mostly a collection of jokes, conceits and puzzles. It’s smart, frisky and sheer catnip for former English majors, a cross between Douglas Adams’ “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and Jonathan Lethem’s “Gun, With Occasional Music,” with a big chunk of “The Norton Anthology of English Literature” tossed in.

And some of the jokes are clever indeed. There’s an ongoing production of “Richard III” done with boisterous audience participation à la “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” — surprisingly plausible and, if you know your theatrical history, not that far off from the spirit of the original performances. Then there’s Thursday’s father, a former colonel in the ChronoGuard gone rogue, who travels back and forth in time, tweaking history in “a one-man war against the bureaucrats within the Office of Temporal Stability.” He stops by to visit Thursday on a trip back to the 10th millennium where he plans to introduce a fruit genetically engineered in 2055. As soon as he vanishes again, Thursday instantly recognizes the formerly unfamiliar “yellow curved thing” as a banana. Her father decides to name it after the engineer who sequenced the plant, Anna Bannon — a nod to Ann Bannon, the legendary author of 1950s lesbian pulp novels.

It’s not just the past that’s in a state of constant revision in “The Eyre Affair”; when Hades kidnaps Jane Eyre from Charlotte Brontë’s original manuscript, all editions of the novel suddenly peter out about a third of the way through — it can’t go on without its first-person narrator. By the time Thursday manages to thwart Hades’ evil scheme with the help of no less than Mr. Rochester himself, the novel will have a new and much more satisfying ending (the one, in fact, that it has in our world). I imagine that “The Eyre Affair” began as a riff on that seminal dream of every passionate reader, the desire to step into the universe of a favorite book, but given Fforde’s prodigious powers of invention, where Thursday’s further adventures will take her is anybody’s guess.

Our next pick: Calvin Trillin’s hilarious story of a New Yorker who finds the ideal parking spot and refuses to leave it

Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
From global warming to fluoride: Why do people deny science? An interesting question.
45 points46 points | 60 comments
vote
Developers evict historic women’s shelter to build luxury hotel - The 104-yr-old Anna Louise Inn has ended its 2-year legal battle with a Fortune 500 company & will now move. Many view the victory of the insurance company over a community touchstone as a major blow to the city.
34 points35 points | 2 comments
vote
Anonymous rallies behind Kaitlyn Hunt
27 points28 points | 34 comments
vote
The GOP Is the 'Party of Crybabies' for Demanding No One Criticize Their Policies or Donors
23 points24 points | comment
vote
Illinois' fracking and coal rush is a national crisis: Illinois and its Mississippi River banks are becoming another ground zero in the war over climate change.
19 points20 points | comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations