Review: The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde

Title: The Eyre Affair
Author: Jasper Fforde
Date Begun: December 21, 2006
Date Completed: December 22, 2006

I've been reading an awful lot of books about other books recently. Don Quixote, The Age of Innocence (you think I'm on crack, but a lot of it is about books), The Friendly Young Ladies...I'm stopping, before you feel the need to point out that The Friendly Young Ladies is about lesbians, not books. Well, it is. But not just lesbians.

The Eyre Affair, however, is primarily about books. In fact, though the blurbs on the cover are eager to compare Thursday Next to Harry Potter, it's really more like James Bond. You know, provided James Bond ever read a book. Fforde has created a really fascinating world to back up his literary jokes, the divergent chronologies reminded me a little of Diane Wynn Jones' Chrestomanci books. (The "this book is like ___" formula is a cliché, but I feel that in this case it is appropriate. Fforde relies on books, and so will I.) That's a good thing - I like the Chrestomanci books. However, I do feel like it weakens the world a little. We learn that Richard III won the Battle of Bosworth Field, for example, so presumably the Tudors didn't take over but a Renaissance England under a Plantagenet king would have been very different...of course, perhaps that's why the identity of Shakespeare's plays is so hotly contested in the books. I don't know, but it did raise some questions for me that I would have preferred not been raised. Fforde already opened up an enormous can of worms by making time travel a common part of his world, I wish he'd stopped there.

See, the problem with time travel is that it sort of fixes all the problems if you use it. It's a deus ex machina, yeah. But when you don't use it and don't explain the not using it, then it gets very frustrating for the reader. I know there were passages where I felt like they could have just had the whole thing solved if Thursday dragged someone from the ChronoGuard into the mix. We're told time travel is dangerous but it still happens an awful lot, so why not use it? As it is the time travel was an amusing side plot to the story and I enjoyed it, but while we saw plenty of examples of it being dangerous that was never enough of a deterrent for its use. Not in the story, not out of it. Frustrating.

But, really, The Eyre Affair is very entertaining. I'm not sure Thursday is, exactly, a real character. She's sort of a vehicle for the plot, I feel. (Sort of like Candide.) But she's fun to read about and she gets to fix Jane Eyre so...I like her, I think. Certainly I can side with her. That's more than I can do with Candide.

The Eyre Affair on Amazon. Jasper Fforde's website.