Books Without Borders :: The Eyre Affair

this author was recommended on a terry pratchett fan site i think, mark forwarded his name to me forever ago and i subsequently forgot it. I was in a bookshop the other day and saw a whole load of his books and figured i'd give one a try. It was mark who reminded me why the name seemed familiar when i got home.

This is what the amazon review had to say

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.

i liked it a lot, although it was a bit odd and took me a little getting into.

Again another one of those books that challenge the way you (or at least I) read. I like my books to make sense. I try and work out the plot. I look for little quirks and subplots and assume they will resolve or sign post for the main plot. I want loose ends to tie up. Jasper Fforde seems congenitally incapable of fulfilling me in any of these desires.

When I first read the Ayre Affair, I was uncomfortable, then annoyed, then really rather upset. Then it occurred to me – that’s not how these books work. They are flights of fancy, they are hilarious, they keep you guessing, but they are not based in anything approaching reality and once you acknowledge this and decide to run with it – you’ll have an amazing time.

Incidentally, if anyone has a chance to go and see the man himself, whether you have read or enjoyed any of his books or not, grab it with both hands. I don’t know when I have encountered such a witty speaker – better than most stand up shows.