Saturday, February 18, 2006
JUST FINISHED: The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde. After barging through Wuthering Heights, I wanted something a bit lighter for a palate cleanser, and somehow that led me to the first of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books .
The place is England in an alternative 1985, where the Crimean War has gone on for 131 years, genetically cloned dodos are edging dogs out as most popular pet, and literature is a source of national pride. The latter is the beat Thursday Next works; as a special operative in charge of literary fraud, her job is to track down the vicious gangs who perpetrate them, which positions her to be the primary opposition for the most ambitious crime against literature yet. The infinitely malevolent (if slightly tilted) Acheron Hades has found a way to enter original manuscripts, and while at first he plans on using this power to decimate Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit for fun and profit, soon he sets his sights signifigantly higher, kidnapping Jane Eyre from her story at a crucial moment in the narrative. In a world where history and reality are far from immutable, now even the classics are up for grabs.
The Eyre Affair was a brisk read; I was in and out in under a day. This is Douglas Adams for lit geeks--with character names like Jack Schitt, it's not going to be highly intellectual--and while in places the pacing seemed slightly off, and a few characters seemed there just to be there, most of it was right on the money. There's almost too much bubbling through the background, but I imagine, like the White Album, it'd be a struggle to prune it down. The Oliver Stone-esque way the characters talk about the "who wrote Shakespeare" controversy was a personal favorite among the major digressions, complete with Marlowe supporters going door-to-door Jehovah's Witness style to pitch their beliefs. And I won't say no to the boisterous audience-participatory Richard III performance.
Either way, it's an enjoyable yarn if you like books at all, although I wouldn't read it before Jane Eyre, since by nature of the story here, there are spoilers aplenty.
The place is England in an alternative 1985, where the Crimean War has gone on for 131 years, genetically cloned dodos are edging dogs out as most popular pet, and literature is a source of national pride. The latter is the beat Thursday Next works; as a special operative in charge of literary fraud, her job is to track down the vicious gangs who perpetrate them, which positions her to be the primary opposition for the most ambitious crime against literature yet. The infinitely malevolent (if slightly tilted) Acheron Hades has found a way to enter original manuscripts, and while at first he plans on using this power to decimate Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit for fun and profit, soon he sets his sights signifigantly higher, kidnapping Jane Eyre from her story at a crucial moment in the narrative. In a world where history and reality are far from immutable, now even the classics are up for grabs.
The Eyre Affair was a brisk read; I was in and out in under a day. This is Douglas Adams for lit geeks--with character names like Jack Schitt, it's not going to be highly intellectual--and while in places the pacing seemed slightly off, and a few characters seemed there just to be there, most of it was right on the money. There's almost too much bubbling through the background, but I imagine, like the White Album, it'd be a struggle to prune it down. The Oliver Stone-esque way the characters talk about the "who wrote Shakespeare" controversy was a personal favorite among the major digressions, complete with Marlowe supporters going door-to-door Jehovah's Witness style to pitch their beliefs. And I won't say no to the boisterous audience-participatory Richard III performance.
Either way, it's an enjoyable yarn if you like books at all, although I wouldn't read it before Jane Eyre, since by nature of the story here, there are spoilers aplenty.
|| Eric 6:40 PM#
