The Eyre Affair

ok, who wouldn't love an alternate reality where a premium is placed on good literature and there is a segment of law enforcement devoted to it; where the rocky “horror picture show” is actually a weekly staging of Richard the III where the actors are cast from the audience and participants yell responses on cue with props in hand; where dna sequencing and cloning allow everyone to have their very own pet dodo?

if your tastes is for good literature with some scifi proclivities on the side, this is totally worth your time.

This is probably a three-star book, but I give it the extra star for two reasons:

1. I really wish I could literally fall into the books I love and that Mr. Rochester (Well, for me it would be Mr. Darcy) could come to my rescue.

2. How cool would it be to be a literary detective! That is so much fictional dream job.

I suspect this one will be better read than heard.

The Eyre Affair – 2.5 Stars:

The book starts off well—original setup, quirky characters, and everything seems to be heading in the right direction. But then it just becomes exhausting. It stretches the concept so much that you want to say, “Enough already, we got it.”

I can see how this might be fun for a certain type of patient reader who enjoys meta-literary play, but for me, this is the first and last book about Thursday Next.

Very satisfying detective/alt-history story that takes place in the 80's. Almost a five-star.

This is my first Jasper Fforde and I think an early work of his. I took it up as I was looking for something comedic after a heavier read and this appeared popular. I had trouble for much of it. Fforde is trying so self-consciously hard to be clever and witty that the imaginative story suffers for it. I was prepared to cut him some slack and continued and it improved from about the half way point.

It's a time travel novel where somebody is going back into original manuscripts of classic novels and removing characters. Thursday Next is the agent who is tracking down the bad guy. Her weird name is only one of many such unfunny puns. Other people are Sturmey Archer and Bowden Cable, both items of bicycle engineering. Yep, painful, no?

There are two themes running through the story. One is an ongoing discussion between Next and other characters about who really wrote the plays of Shakespeare. It's an oft repeated discussion point. Second theme is the story of Jane Eyre, especially the ending that people did not like. I hadn't read Jane Eyre but it sounded false to me.

As the book came to an end Fforde's finest humour came to the fore. The real author of Shakespeare's plays becomes known, although only to Next. And the ending of Jane Eyre is resolved to everybody's satisfaction in a great plot twist.

Such a mixed bag for me. I loved it at first - the world felt delightfully whimsical, fun, clever, and bursting with promise. A secret agent solving crimes against literature in a setting where dodos still exist and Wales is a separate socialist republic. How could this be boring?

Quite easily, it turns out. Before the halfway point, the novelty wore off for me. It becomes quickly apparent that Thursday Next is a charmless character to be stuck with in first-person, which Fforde seems to realise because he ditches her off for third-person at jarring intervals. She gets a bland, tacked-on romance subplot, of course. There's very little characterisation for anyone else beyond having joke names that get old fast. The dialogue is functional at best and conspicuously rubbish at worst. Despite all the colourful meta potential, a lot of the story and writing comes off as oddly po-faced and boring.

I really expected more craft and wit from a book whose whole schtick hinges on the literary, but the execution fails to live up to the lofty premise. Maybe the series gets better, but I'm not rushing to find out.

There's something about Jasper Fforde. The premises described in the summaries of his novels always sound weird and silly, but once you sit down with the book they're perfectly engaging and believable.

My working theory of why this is so is because he writes with a first-person protagonist who takes the situation deadly seriously, and so I do too. (Mostly first-person narrative, this one flip-flopped around a bit because I suppose the reader needed certain info that Thursday couldn't have.)

Having said that, this is a far from deadly serious book. There's lots of wit and deadpan humor. Probably a fun one for readers who like both science fiction fantasy and classic literature.

My favorite thing, which will be in my head for years to come, is the Rocky-Horrorization of Richard III that happens in this book. Don't know if real performances like this exist or if it's Fforde's wild imagination but it sure was fun to picture.

I highly enjoyed this book. It was a bit all over the place though which might dissuade others from reading it or enjoying it, but honestly, I'm a bit all over the place so I felt right at home. I tried explaining this book to several people and failed miserably. I can't quite explain the extensive chaos in this book, but I adored it.

2021 re-read: Just as delightful a read as it was the first time I read it 6 years ago. This book has the absurdity of Douglas Adams, the humour of Terry Pratchett, and with a healthy dose of classic literature references thrown into the mix. Fforde's writing style is always so engaging and easy, and I also love how short and sweet each chapter was. This book was just so easy to breeze through.

In an alternate universe where timey-wimey things happen (and where the Crimean War is still ongoing well into the 1980s), Thursday Next is a Special Operations exec - specifically in SO-27 as a LiteraTec (Literary Detective). In this world, having a stance on who really wrote Shakespeare's plays is as serious a business as a political leaning and could well get people arrested and charged. Thursday Next is called upon for help against her ex-lecturer-turned-master-villain, Acheron Hades, who is threatening beloved literary characters like Martin Chuzzlewit and, for his coup de grace, Jane Eyre.

The action is non-stop in this book. There's something happening in every chapter. There's some nugget and gem of literary humour on every page. Every character has at least an awesome name, such as Mycroft Next, Thursday's sometimes-genius uncle, and her eventual boss, Victor Analogy. Even the villain, believably threatening and sinister though he was, had some degree of charisma. “I'm not mad, I'm just differently moralled,” he quips.

The only perhaps downside that may not be everyone's cup of tea is that all the different threads that do come together in the end may be just a bit too overwhelming for some. Because this is a world very much like our own but with just tiny details that are different, a lot of readers unfamiliar with the whole history of the Crimean War and the Light Armoured Brigade might feel completely at sea. I'm one of this number, having barely any knowledge on the above, but I still found that I was able to keep up with whatever was happening as long as you don't think too hard about the timey-wimey stuff.

About the ending: I also get that the book was, in a way, supposed to slightly parallel Jane Eyre in how Thursday initially rejects Landen, but then stopped his wedding to Daisy Mutlar in the same style Jane Eyre's wedding to Rochester is interrupted, and then later on marries Landen herself. Bowden Cable, who is supposed to be a St. John Rivers parallel, initially proposes to Thursday and invites her to go with him to Ohio as his wife or assistant, to which she briefly considers - again, like Jane. However, I kinda found myself rooting for Bowden way more than Landen! For one, he certainly appears a lot more in the novel than Landen does, he does a lot more to actually support Thursday through the action of the novel, and I thought it was pretty shitty that, immediately after getting rejected by Thursday, Landen just goes ahead to propose to and very nearly goes ahead with getting married with Daisy Mutlar. Would he have just gone through with it if it hadn't been found out that she was actually already married?! I just can't get behind it tbh.

Overall, this is a huge recommendation for anyone who's a fan of Dickens, Jane Eyre, classic literature overall, and an absurd sense of humour.

I love the Thursday Next series, although I hadn't read The Eyre Affair in a long time. In rereading it, I realized that while I still enjoyed it and it's important for world-building, I don't love it as much as some of the later books in the series. The first half is darker and more intense than I remembered, and then the end of it wraps things up a bit too quickly. But I do love how deep this book goes into Jane Eyre, and I do just love Thursday Next.

So imaginative. If you love books and you might enjoy it for the world alone. feels like a first novel at a number of points

It took me a minute to get through this book, but I blame anxiety more so than the micro print. About halfway through the book I had to rewatch the movie Jane Eyre, because lord knows I'm not about to read some Brontë. I love the feel of escaping into a book within a book. Eventually I will have to get more books in the Thursday Next series. Spike, Rochester, and Pickwick together would make a amazing and hilarious side quest. I'm hoping for more of Spike in the rest of the series.

My only feeling is why didn't I read this book earlier. I only discovered this series a couple of weeks ago and when I finally read it, it was fantastic.

The book is set in London in 1985 but it technologically much more advanced. People have cloned versions of extinct animals as pets which are perfected with every version, England and Russia are in a century long war over the occupation of Crimea, a Special Operations (SpecOps) department called Chronoguard deals with time travel, temporal instabilities etc. Our protagonist Thursday Next works for SpecOps-27 as a LiteraTec (Literary detective) because in this world, books are valued a lot. Baconians go door-to-door trying to persuade people that Shakespeare didn't write his plays, there is a militant Marlovian group that believes that the author is Kit Marlowe instead, each famous author has federations named after them with millions of followers.

It is in this world that an original Dickens manuscript is stolen by a most wanted criminal called Acheron Hades and Thursday investigates. Her uncle develops a Prose Portal using which you can jump into the world of any book and meet the living, breathing characters. When he is kidnapped by Hades, it is only a matter of time before a character from the Dickens manuscript is killed, which in turn removes the character from all the copies of the book in the world. But this is only the beginning and all hell breaks lose when Hades steals the original manuscript of Jane Eyre. In the course of negotiations, both Hades and Thursday end up jumping into the Jane Eyre world and it is here that Hades is finally defeated but not before the ending is changed dramatically (which is what we now know).

The book is so much fun, especially for book worms like me. There are a lot of literary references in the book, some of which I didn't know but was able to find out. The Prose Portal is a wonderful idea and any number of readers will want to visit the worlds of their favorite books. The only slight disappointment was with the motivation of Hades. A genius who believed that before his intellect, the whole world looks infested with cretins ends up just wanting to earn money. His character warranted a little more ambition than just plain old greed. But on the whole, this is an awesome world and I am all excited to be a part of Thursday's adventures in the next books.

Some of the reviews I read gave this book a single star and many of those said they never finished. Others gave this book five stars. I fall in the middle on this one. Jane Eyre is my favorite novel, so I was excited to see how she/the novel would be incorporated into this mystery. I do think the plot line of JE was used well, but I did want to see a bit more of it. I also wanted the main character to interact more with Jane, have more conversations; I wanted the writer to really capture Jane's spirit, but I don't think she did. The story is very creative, and being the first in a series, I feel a lot of sub plot lines and characters had to be introduced and explained, so it felt like it jumped around quite a bit. There were some really clever moments throughout - one being the Wordsworth poem (but I won't say more to avoid spoiling anything). I am inclined to read more of these books.

I couldn't get in the spirit of the “literary slapstick” style as one incisive friend put it. Oh well, you might like this if you're a Bronte and/or Dickens fan and do OK with “look how clever I'm being!” humor.

Executive Summary: This is a book that should be right up my alley. However while I did enjoy it, I found the execution wasn't quite as good as I hoped.Audiobook: Susan Duerdan did a fine job with the narration. She spoke clearly and with good inflection. Audio is definitely a good option for this one.Full ReviewOne of my favorite games as a kid was called Myst. If you're not familiar, you find yourself in a strange place with little understanding of where you are and how you got there. As you explore you discover it's possible to travel between worlds with magical books.The general premise of this book had a similar feel to me. It also adds in some extra things like time travel, that I thought bordered on “too much” but was handled pretty well overall. The book is fun, and the main character Thursday Next is quite likeable. She's smart and capable. Plush, the bibliophile in me loves the idea of a “book division” of the British Secret Service. So why only three stars? Well I imagine it's much for the same reason some people don't love [b:Ready Player One 9969571 Ready Player One Ernest Cline https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1489368740s/9969571.jpg 14863741] like I did. I didn't get most of the references. I didn't even know [b:Jane Eyre 10210 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327867269s/10210.jpg 2977639] was an actual book. I thought he had made it up for this novel. Oops.It turns out despite having read a ton of books in my lifetime, and this book being rather fantastical, I didn't read the “right” books. I only had a vague knowledge and interest in most of the authors besides Shakespeare, and I haven't touched him since High School.I will say this book is probably better written than [b:Ready Player One 9969571 Ready Player One Ernest Cline https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1489368740s/9969571.jpg 14863741] is, and that can make up for some of it. However it was only enough for it to get a good, not great opinion from me.I think if you're a classic/British literature fan, and you enjoy the premise of traveling into your favorite book this book may be more enjoyable for you than it was for me. I may continue on in the series, but at this point I'm not in any rush. I think it ended well enough for me to stop here if that's what I end up doing.

Not for me. I knew it would be silly, but I did not find it funny or engaging.

First time rereading in six years and what an excellent time to do so - June 2016 (if you read the book, you'll get the date). The book is still amazing. One day I need to read the second one in the series.

This was full of fun moments, and the outright joy with which it approached literature, and literary culture, was absolutely delightful. Those moments, however, didn't always feel like they connected into a fully-developed world. I was reminded a bit of those attempts to take Saturday Night Live characters and spin them off into movies that were ultimately unsatisfactory (although the humour of The Eyre Affair is decidedly more Pythonesque than SNL).
Overall I'd say it's worth a read.

I forgot how much fun this series is! I read The Eyre Affair for the first time about 6 years ago, back before I was really tracking my reading. So, when my book club chose it for our monthly read, I was ecstatic to dive back in!

Jasper Fforde is the master of literary humor. His in-jokes are wonderful, and his character names just as good. This book is like a love letter to bookish people everywhere. Especially if you're a fan of the classics. Thursday's world is beautiful chaos. She lives in a Great Britain that is similar to ours, but also filled with all manner of curiosities. Time travel is owned by the government, LiteraTechs exist to protect our written works, and the paranormal has a foothold as well. I love the way Fforde brings all of that to life, and makes it seem utterly plausible.

This particular book puts us smack dab in the middle of a high profile heist. Thursday's life is turned upside down when she's asked to track down Archeron Hades, a master villain. I have to say, as much as Hades is a perfect villain, he's also absolutely fascinating! I loved the back and forth between him and Thursday. Both brilliant, both stubborn, both excellent at what they did. In fact, Thursday's relationships throughout the book were my favorite part. She has quite the habit of getting caught up in things that are dangerous.

I honestly forgot how much I adore Thursday Next and her wacky version of Great Britain. I'm so glad I had the chance to experience it all over again! I can't wait to read more!

Overall this was a pleasant book, but I shy away from putting it at the same level as an Asimov mystery novel. This is a 2,5 stars. If I read through the end, I kind of liked it.

This is probably a book for those who love English literature, Shakespeare, Keats and others. The authors creates an alternative reality where books really matter, so much that there is a very active Spec-ops crime division, where our heroin Thursday Next works.

Some of the occurrences that are somewhat common in this world:

- literary forgeries, where books are slightly, but significantly rewritten to better suit the forger views of how the story should really have happened. They sometimes go through great lengths, even writing original manuscripts, signing it as a famous author. Only a very trained Literary Tech can spot the differences between the real thing.

- close to religion fights among different literary legends followers, such as Baconians and Shakesperians. Jehovah witness? Try some people going door to door, spreading over developed theories of how it wasn't Shakespeare that wrote any of his plays!

- Time traveling is somewhat common, even though heavily policed.

The plot is slowly developed along the book. The real plot only starts somewhat by the end of it. The villain appears at the start of the book, and then at the end again. He has some super human powers that are never explained, and our heroin is the only one that can resist them for whatever reason.

There are are many subplots that are nowhere connected. There is a 100+ years war going on between England and Russia going on. There is a whole chapter of a fight with a vampire. Yes, it did have an impact latter on, but it didn't play well for me. It added color to the story, but added to the lack of cohesion of the book.

I liked the villain. He is described as being pure evil, he delights himself in wickedness. He actually wrote the book “Degeneracy for Fun and Profit”. He is a mastermind criminal and he has superhuman powers (close to immortal, ageless, super strength). Because of that, I would expect a better end for him.

The book has a very standard happy ending, which did not sit well with me. I like unusual things, and the plot gave ample leeway for for that.

But again, for those who love English literature, who have read and liked Jaine Eyre, it must have had an special feeling to wonder how it would fell like to interact with the characters, to change the story, to fear for the integrity of its plot, for its very existence!

Struggled through this, book was a little dry, straight forward writing, just couldn't hold my interest. The end (last 100 pages or so) made the book worthy of a 4 star rating. Those pages I thoroughly enjoyed!

The Eyre Affair is the first published novel by English author Jasper Fforde. It takes place in alternative 1985, where literary detective Thursday Next pursues a master criminal through the world of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Thursday Next works as part of a Special Operations Network that was created to “handle policing duties considered either to unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force”.

She inhabits an entire alternative world which mixes low-tech, such as travel by airship with high-tech, such as cloning and time travel. Literature seems to be the opium of the masses, a national passion and it has taken the place of activities such as sport.

As such The Eyre Affair Fforde is a humorous postmodern reworking of well know works of literature. It also mingles in versions of historical events, such as The Crimean War. It spans genres such as fantasy, sci-fi, crime, horror, romance, thriller, you name it really. This genre hopping may be off putting for some people but I didn't mind it as such.

It has been described as “Monty Python crossed with Terry Pratchett, or J.K. Rowling mixed with Douglas Adams.” And I think this is a fair description. The book is whimsical and off beat. But it's imaginative and the implied references to famous works is illuminating. But you don't need to be an authority on these referenced books to enjoy the story. If I read The Eyre Affair again I would try to list out the links to other novels or places and research them. By doing this then it would add some texture and depth to the plot.

Fforde's writing style is eccentric and whimsical, but I loved it. This book was something different and was a great first novel, if a little rough around the edges. At times certain parts of the story required re-reading to ensure that the plot was clear. Also, his descriptions of places were slightly too shallow. This meant that visualising settings was sometimes difficult. Also the character point of views seem to get a little muddled at times. But it's all good fun, and educational too.

I'll continue to read the series as I don't often find a book that is as original as The Eyre Affair. If can manage to suspend your belief and use your imagination then you'll enjoy this book. A great start by Fforde; I hope the books in the ongoing series can at least match, if not improve on it.

absolutely loved the world that the author crafts in this book.