Eyre Apparent (The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde)

Member Name: ruth_cole

Product:	The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
Date:	18/10/04 (404 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: witty, clear prose, engaging characters, pacy plot

Disadvantages: begins to wilt slightly towards the end

Thursday Next has got a lot on her plate at the moment. For starters she's one of very few people in the world who would recognise Acheron Hades, the third most evil man in the world, and despite being a lowly LiteraTec, she's a tough woman, not afraid to get her hands dirty. Which is exactly what she's going to have to do if Hades doesn't stop kidnapping characters from fiction for ransom. In the meantime, if she can cope with time-stopping visits from her father, moving back to Swindon, the close attentions of the ice-cold Jack Schitt from the shadowy Goliath Corp and if she can convince the man she loves to marry her (having first convinced herself that she can marry him), then she might just be alright...

Making any sense yet? Well, surprisingly quickly, it does. Jasper Fforde has not taken us any further than a slightly alternate reality, where the Special Operations Network agents, or SpecOps, are graded from the top secret SO-1 all the way down to ranks such as SO-27's LiteraTecs, or literary detectives, whose job it is to investigate such matters as who really wrote Shakespeare's plays. (You might be surprised at the answer). Thursday Next is our narrator and guide through this world of politics and literature, and she's a likeable human one.

Possibly one of my favourite things about Thursday was how instantly I could get annoyed at her, and yet how charming I found her guts and intelligence. She's a normal woman, a normal person in fact, with foibles and charisma, and even when pining over the elusive Landen Parke-Laine, she does so without any emetic moments. (An aside, here, but don't you just love Fforde's names? And that's without even mentioning Millon de Floss. Ack, ack, ack). She's straight-talking and good at her job, but she has a lot of passion and pride and a few shadows hanging over her. And that's good enough for any main character.

Other characters who pop in and out of the fray are equally well written and preserved. Thursday's meandering time-travelling father is a scattily absorbing creation, and the personification of Edward Fairfax Rochester a faithful and warm one. My personal favourite was Acheron Hades, who in almost every particular is highly resonant of David Warner's supremely evil being in Time Bandits. A fierce intellect, a predilection towards elegance and style and manufacturing sidekicks and a seemingly invulnerable exterior all add up to a charming and respectable villain. The kind you can imagine curling their lip as they nonchalantly shoot their 42nd victim, and the kind that, for all their evil, you'd be sorry to see defeated.

A quote to illustrate my point:

"...all of you have been my faithful servants for many years, and although none of you possess a soul quite as squalid as mine, and the faces I see before me are both stupid and unappealing, I regard you all with no small measure of fondness."

(if that isn't pure Gilliam on paper, I don't know what is)

Fforde's character names I've mentioned briefly already, but they're worth noting again, because they are pretty funny. His choice of Martin Chuzzlewit as one of the targets of Hades' campaign highlights the fact that he has a pretty Dickensian approach to names as complementing personalities himself. Quite deliberately, quite amusingly.

Fforde's writing style is instantly engaging and free-flowing as well. Despite the numerous cultural references, a bit like Pratchett (who, on the cover, professes to be watching his back for Fforde) if you don't get all of it, it doesn't much matter; I certainly wasn't aware of any particularly esoteric references that were beyond me, but there might well have been. The point is, it's not important. This is not a highbrow tome to make you feel undereducated. But you do need to be book-minded, and you do need a familiarity with Jane Eyre. If you've not read it, not only will it entirely spoil the book for you, but the references to different possibly endings will tie you up in a confused knot. And yet this is very different from Pratchett because it has a decidedly more ridiculous, self-parodying vein, and it is set in this world, or at least a version of it.

The Eyre Affair is a little bit of everything, then, humour, detective story, parody and homage. And as such it's a delightfully silly pleasure to read. It's clever, but not to the point of alienation, and it's pacy enough that I read two thirds of it on a day off sick - it's not a long book at just under 400 pages and the chapters are structured bursts of blistering inanity, that often have cliffhangers. Each is prefaced by a quote from a book such as Thursday's autobiography, or Acheron's Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit (which for some reason made me think of Toby Young - perhaps he really is the Diet Coke of Evil...?)

Fforde's website, with its infinite and bizarre links, www.thursdaynext.com makes it clear that this is a series of which the next has already been published (and is previewed, with a pair of hilarious print ads at the end of the Coronet paperback edition); it's really an extended crime caper by a man who loves his books. As if the tongue-in-cheek tone of the book were not clear enough, Fforde includes a link to parodies of his work.

All in all I'd say a pretty entertaining read then. Lack of breathtaking excellence prevents it from getting a full five stars (I save that for what I consider the truly exceptional) but the four it does get are fully merited. Written with clarity and good humour, and populated by the engaging, it's definitely a winner, even if it does get slightly tired towards the end.

I just wonder what would happen if someone used the Prose Portal on the original copy of this...


Paperback Coronet Books (www.madaboutbooks.com)
Rrp £6.99
Isbn 0-340-73356-X

Alex
xxx

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