Quick Review: The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde

[jeriendhal]

Summary: In an England where literary rivalries are held with the same passion as football clubs are in ours, and the Crimean War is approaching it's 165th year, Spec Ops 27 agent Thursday Next must track down Achernar Hades, the third most evil man in the world, before he can steal the original manuscript for Jane Eyre and enter the book to physically kidnap the heroine herself.

Review: Another book from Jasper Fforde which takes cheerful fun taking every literary trope in the, er, book and running with it. It's slightly more serious than his Nursery Crimes series, with an emphasis on slightly. It's hard take any world completely seriously when the heroine's mad inventor uncle invents a "prose portal" in his backyard shed and one of the secondary villains is literally named "Jack Schitt". As an AU author, he's too slapdash to do a good job, but it hardly matters, given the pace of the book hardly allows for introspection.

Read it.

Comments

[kd5mdk.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by too slapdash to do a good job? The world is intended to be absurd, so I don't find it's implausibility to be a drawback at all.

[chewipaka.livejournal.com]

Have you read the books after? Because those might be coloring your thoughts about the world. I feel like Thursday Next's universe becomes more coherent and sensible and better thought out in the following books. And then going back and rereading The Eyre Affair makes more sense after reading the others. Aka, I see where Royce is coming from. (What, I haven't read the Eyre affair about five times in the past year, what?)