The Eyre Affair review

[alobear]

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde was recommended to me by someone, so I decided to give it a try, despite being rather put off by the blurb on the back, which reads:

"Meet Thursday Next, literary detective without equal, fear or boyfriend. There is another 1985, where London's criminal gangs have moved into the lucrative literary market, and Thursday Next is on the trail of the new crime wave's Mr Big. Acheron Hades has been kidnapping characters from works of fiction and holding them to ransom. Jane Eyre is gone. Missing. Thursday sets out to find a way into the book to repair the damage."

From this, I was expecting something along the lines of Craig Shaw Gardner or Robert Rankin, a ridiculous spoof with terrible plot devices and even worse puns. And that was precisely what it looked like at first. To begin with, the book was far too pleased with its own cleverness, and the execrable puns were so numerous that the plot was almost entirely obscured.

However, around about page 87, it settled down into actually telling a story, and turned out to be not only really good, but also not really a comedy at all. Behind its veneer of silliness, it dealt with quite a few mature themes, including war, guilt and regret. The conclusion was a little rushed, and a couple of the plot points got wrapped up a little too neatly, but overall it was a good read, which reminded me more of Christopher Brookmyre than anything else.

The spoiler warning was for the blurb itself, rather than the review, since it got the plot wrong, as well as the tone. Jane Eyre doesn't get kidnapped until page 296, and Thursday knows how to get into the book all along, so the focus of the story really isn't the kidnapping at all.