The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde)

Rating: [rate 4.5]

The Eyre Affair by Jasper FfordeMeet Thursday Next, literary detective without equal, fear or boyfriend.

There is another 1985, where London’s criminal gangs have moved into the lucrative literary market, and Thursday Next is on the trail of the new crime wave’s Mr. Big.

Acheron Hades has been kidnapping characters from works of fiction and holding them to ransom. Jane Eyre is gone. Missing.

Thursday sets out to find a way into the book to repair the damage. But solving crimes against literature isn’t easy when you also have to find time to halt the Crimean War, persuade the man you love to marry you, and figure out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

Perhaps today just isn’t going to be Thursday’s day…

The Eyre Affair is the first book in the Thursday Next series. The novel starts with Thursday meeting with her dad, who is an eradicated and rogue ChronoGuard trying to stop the French revisionists from changing the past and future and also telling Thursday about when the world might end (but that doesn’t really start until the next books). Thursday is a Crimean War veteran, lost her brother and probably the love of her life when she left the war. She works in London’s Special Operatives (SpecOps) as part of the LiteraTecs (SO-27), who polices various literary fraud in London. Thursday gets recruited to SO-5 (the Search and Containment unit of SpecOps) to help capture Acheron Hades, being a former student of his. Unfortunately, things took a bad term as her workmates get killed in an ambush attack with Acheron Hades. Thursday wakes up in a hospital with bare recollection of what happened to her, and then finds herself being told by her future self in a colorful sports car that Hades is alive and that she should take the LiteraTec job at Swindon, her hometown. And that’s when her world becomes even crazier.

This is the second Thursday Next novel I read (the first one I read is Something Rotten, the last novel in the TN series), so it is here where I got a lot of background information that was kind of mentioned in TN-4. The book moves smoothly from each chapter to the next, as it introduces you to Thursday’s crazy alternate world. This book also made a lot of references to other novels which would make you want to read them as well. Okay, maybe not for you, but it certainly urged me to do that too. :P

The only thing I kind of didn’t like in the book is that it took a long time before they got to Jane Eyre. Although Jane Eyre was mentioned earlier in the chapters, the main action with her out in the real world happened in the latter chapters. It did wrap up nicely, but I think there’s too much suspense with Martin Chuzzlewit which had no relation with Jane Eyre except that it was tampered too.

Nevertheless, this book is great. :) It would open a big door in your imagination as you take a walk around Thursday’s world. :)