... 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 ... Read review
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, ... more
Jasper Fforde's outrageousThe Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War ...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, ... more
Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, ... more
Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard. Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames. Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney
Postage & Packaging:£2.75 Availability:Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, ... more
Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard. Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames. Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney
Postage & Packaging:£2.75 Availability:Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, ... more
Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard. Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames. Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney
Postage & Packaging:£2.75 Availability:Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, ... more
Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard. Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames. Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney
Postage & Packaging:£2.75 Availability:Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Advantages: pacy and witty Disadvantages: a tiny bit dragging towards the end
...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 ... ...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 ... more
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
Advantages: A remarkably clever and enjoyable read Disadvantages: Characters, A knowledge of Jane Eyre is helpful
The 1980’s. A decade when Margaret Thatcher ruled with an iron handbag, Great Britain was once again a victor in a colonial war, miners flexed and then lost their power, and music was newly romantic.
Or was it?
1985. A year when England is controlled by the Goliath Corporation (an for profit organisation that although representing capitalism is of the like that George Orwell might have had mind), the Crimean War has been raging for over 150 years ... ...Republic and a well off the tourist path. Can you imagine that?
If this wasn’t enough, the world is literature obsessed. A world where an army of Baconites go around, in Jehovah Witness style, attempting to persuade people that their man, Francis Bacon, was responsible for Shakespeare’s plays, - and Richard III is a an audience participation show akin to a Panto or the Rocky Horror Show.
In this mad topsy-turvy world, created by Jasper Fforde, ...
mouette 01.10.2003 (23.12.2003)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
Advantages: Awsome new exciting fantsy workd Disadvantages: you cant put it down so you end up fineshing it to fast
...and ingenious alternate universe where the Crimean war still rages and the Chrono guard rule time .Her father is a rogue agent in the said chronoguard which leads to many a hilarious time line joke. Thursday has to do battle against an insanely scary and seemingly unkillable bad guy Hades hunting him down even so far as to travel inside of a book erherm .
I don't want to give too much away in the story line but If you like the idea of a mad but ... ...review by Pratchett himself.
The only downside I can see with this book is it can just disappear, you get so engrossed in the wonderful world Fforde spins around you that before you know it the It's finished .
A great Introduction to a new and exciting world of fantasy that's leaves you needing the next book and then the next and so on . The follow books in the series are Lost In A Good Book
The Well Of Lost Plots
Something Rotten
And next book ...
Phildude 14.12.2006
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
Advantages: Funny, entertaining, sufficiently wacky Disadvantages: Predictable at times.
I love these books because the key theme appeals to anyone likely to read it in the first place, books! The whole story revolves around a society's love of reading, where the headlines are full of book related crimes and there is a whole police department devoted to novels - an idea that in our world, where books are generally sidelined, all book lovers enjoy! The baddy, Acheron Hades is uncomplicatedly evil, a villian who we love to hate and want ... ...interesting to read about. All the side characters are ridiculously over the top and delightfully described, a personal favourite being Miss Haversham. The book is full to the brim with inuendos and toungue and cheek references to other books and films. The humour is spot on, bringing out the real heart and love of the book. Fforde's imagination is unquestionable and the world he creates is fascinating, not wholly unbelievable. The only criticism, ...
Billieuk 22.09.2006
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Quick review of The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
Wonderfully, suprisingly different.
I was given this as a Christmas present - and had heard nothing about it before then. I was very pleasantly surprised. It's odd, quircky, gives a nod towards the literary greats (makes studying them all in GCSE english lit worthwhile) and is very well written.
Reading this book was like being gradually trained for a marathon. Fforde gently introduces more and more logic stretching aspects to the story (which is set in a Britain in a 1980s that almost happened - if a few things had gone differently a few years/decades/centuries before) - but also throws in some sci-fi surprises and twists for good measure.
Overall - well worth the read and higly recommended. ...
chocchipchunk 26.01.2009
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
Advantages: A great book Disadvantages: You may end up buying the rest of the series
...on a short interview with the author that I had read in a writer's magazine and the fron cover which is very unusual for me.
I really couldn't put this book down - it was not quite like anything I've read before , alhtough if I had to describe the style it would be like Robert Rankin but in a bit more of a believable setting.
Even though I'm not a great fan of classic literature I enjoyed the book and didn't seem to 'not get' the many in-jokes ... ...you're not into the classics - although this is kind of the basis to the plot it has no effect on how well you will get on with reading it.
The plot was fantastic - you never quite know what is going to happen next, and even more so in this book as being the first one of Jaspers' books I had read it took a while to get used to his style and be able to guess what was likely to happen. This I think made it slightly more enjoyable than the rest of ...
thecornflake 14.02.2006
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Advantages: full of amusing moments and mentions of nursery rhyme characters. Disadvantages: bit hectic in some places, characters which aren't needed.
I am not completely sure why I picked this book up. The front cover-a cartoon esque image of a detective-suggests to me a story basd in years gone by. An era which fails to interest me. It also states that 'it is very funny.' Another aspect which makes me wary. One mans P G Wodehouse is another mans Tom Holt. If that makes sense.
JasperFforde, author of The EyreAffair and Something Rotten seems to be well known for his amusing novels although I've rarely come across any. Until now that is. Based in Reading, The Big Over Easy is the first book out of the Nursery Crime series.
In an alternative style world where it would be perfectly normal to come across a greek god living in a rented house with a strict land lady, Mr Humpty Dumpty has fallen off of his wall for the last time. The 65 year old egg who has an eye for the ladies ...
Advantages: Some truly inspired ideas Disadvantages: Disconnected set-pieces; Written too quickly?
As a benchmark for a writer's true ability, second novels usually provide the greatest insight. First novels often contain the best idea that a writer will have, and while some of the writing finesse will not yet be quite developed, that great idea will carry the story well. Novels after the second, by their simple existence, will show that a writer has 'stickability' and will most certainly have learned more of the craft. But the second novel is something entirely different, especially when combined with a successful first novel and an idea you're trying to turn into a series.
The EyreAffair proved a winner for JasperFforde, dropping Spec-Ops Operative 'Thursday Next' into literary misadventures in an alternative 1985 Swindon where Dodos and Mammoths have been recreated from their DNA and time-travel paradox is a way of life (sort ...
Advantages: Well written lunacy Disadvantages: Airships over an alternate Britain
Lost in a Good Book charts the continuing adventures of Thursday Next, dodo-owning, book-jumping, literary detective and decorated war hero. The book opens a few months after the events of JasperFforde's debut The EyreAffair, and sees our heroine getting increasingly fed up with being at the centre of a media circus.
Facing a court case from the mysterious Jurisfiction for altering the ending to Jane Eyre, and dealing with blackmail threats from the sinister Goliath Corporation - who are desperate to retrieve their operative from the pages of Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Raven', it only takes a few short pages for the reader to realise that they're dealing with a very unique style of fiction.
Told entirely in the first person from Next's point of view, the Thursday Next series is relentlessly hilarious for anyone who's read a lot ...
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