Amazon.co.uk Review
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, 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
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Review
'What Fforde is pulling is a variation on the classic Monty Python gambit: the incongruous juxtaposition og low comedy and high erudition - this scam has not been pulled off with such off-hand finesse and manic verve since the Pythons shut up shop. 'The Eyre Affair' is a silly book for smart people: postmodernism played as raw, howling farce' -- Independent 'It is always a privilege to watch the birth of a cult, and Hodder has just cut the umbilical cord. Always ridiculous, often hilarious ... blink and you miss a vital narrative leap. There are shades of Douglas Adams, Lewis Carroll, 'Clockwork Orange' and '1984'. And that's just for starters' -- Time Out, on THE EYRE AFFAIR 'Ingenious - I'll watch Jasper Fforde nervously' 'Surely a cult in the making' 'If you want a change from these stories of loves fractured and rebuilt there is not shortage of gloriously eccentric alternatives. Jasper Fforde's much-hyped debut next month THE EYRE AFFAIR in which a literary detective has to stop an arch-criminal kidnapping characters from works of fiction and holding them to ransom as well as engineering a halt to the ongoing Crimean War. Enough? I haven't even mentioned the pet dodo and the aunt trapped in Wordsworth poem.' 'Delightfully clever ... Filled with clever wordplay, literary allusion and bibliowit, THE EYRE AFFAIR combines elements of Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But its quirky charm is all its own.' -- Wall Street Journal 'A decidedly quirky and strangely thought-provoking debut novel' 'The eccentric epic - A read that'll leave you breathless' 'The reader is catapulted in and out of truth and imagination on a hectic, humorous and neatly constructed chase that finishes by tying up every loose end in the most satisfying, novelistic way' '[She's] part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew and part Dirty Harry' -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, on Thursday Next 'Jasper Fforde's FASCINATING FIRST NOVEL reads like a Jules Verne story told by Lewis Carroll...Forget all the rules of time, space, and reality; just sit back and enjoy the adventure as Thursday, with the help of Jane Eyre's Mr Rochester, fights a desperate battle in which Jane herself is in jeopardy.' 'Dark, funny, complex and inventive, The Eyre Affair is a breath of fresh air, and is easily one of the strongest debuts in years.'
Show more editions and formats
Show fewer editions and formats
by Jasper Fforde
by Jasper Fforde
by Jasper Fforde
by Jasper Fforde
by Jasper Fforde
