"The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde

 

I was heading home from Australia, mooching around an airport bookshop when I first spotted the works of Jasper Fforde, in fact Book 3 in the "Thursday Next" series. My eye caught the image of a Porsche 365 Speedster decorated in multicoloured M.C. Escher hues and, like most book purchase choices, that and a brief look at the blurb was enough to sell me on it. Of course, reading book 3 of a series immediately meant that when I got home having voraciously consumed the book I needed the others.

"The Eyre Affair" was where Jasper's incredibly clever and brilliantly imagined book universe began, the tale of a literary detective whose life literally revolves around - and often ends up inside - classic works of fiction. 

Thursday Next is the sort of woman you want at the front and centre of your novel. Clever, resourceful, ridiculously brave but also a maelstrom of chaos, often looking to buck or break the rules in order to achieve what's right. In this case, Thursday's case begins with the pursuit of a familiar enemy, the viciously psychopathic and machiavellian Acheron Hades - a being who bends the will of others to his means with all the ease of a Jedi master convincing a deathstick salesman to go and take a day off to rethink his life. 

Thanks to the invention of her uncle, the "Prose Portal", Hades' insidious plan is to remove well-loved characters in popular fiction from their novels, targetting the manuscripts, killing off the characters and thus rendering the likes of Martin Chuzzlewit and Jane Eyre changed forever for the worse. 

Hades is no walkover. He kills without thought, recruiting nefarious henchmen to do his bidding, disposing of innocent members of the public just to supply them with new identities, literally ripping the faces off passers-by as the ultimate disguise. 

Time is of the essence, and as Jane Eyre herself looks like she's going to be Hades' next sacrifice, Thursday's next case could be her last.

Fforde expertly pulls his references into the story threads beautifully at times, then at others the story pace is like one of his dodos, toddling along at a pace before tripping over its oversized beak. In the rush to be clever, in this first novel at least, there are times when you're left with that weird Dan Brown-ism where it takes a character four chapters just to get through a door and that does bug at times. 

But there's no denying that, though Fforde's later works might be a bit arse-wallpapery, the Thursday Next series (and the soon to be reviewed Nursery Crimes books - which are, in my humble opinion, absolutely brilliant overlooked gems which really should've stretched for more than just two books) really is a superb piece of fantasy that no book lover should ignore. If nothing else it might make you want to read Jane Eyre again (which is always a good thing to do!)