The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Readers of Douglas Adams and P. G. Wodehouse will enjoy travelling to Jasper Fforde’s 1985 Great Britain, where time travel is commonplace, cloning is possible (dodos are the preferred resurrection pet), and literature is taken very, very seriously. In a virtual police state like England, where it’s illegal to forge Byronic verse, an aunt can become lost in a Wordsworth poem (literally). For Thursday Next, a well-known literary detecting Special Operative, everything is routine. But Thursday faces the biggest obstacle of her career when someone starts kidnapping literary figures and removes Jane Eyre from the pages of Charlotte Bronte’s novel.
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
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Fforde’s brilliant fiction, which is supplemented by a website that recreates the novel’s setting, cleverly combines mystery with English literature. Since the Crimean War began 130 years ago, England and Russia have been at war. The United Kingdom doesn’t exist. Wales is a sovereign state. Animals that were once extinct can be cloned; dodos make excellent pets. Special Operations is a federal agency that primarily oversees national security. Our protagonist Thursday Next is a SO-27 agent and a literary detective (that’s a name, last name Next, first name Thursday). Her father is a disgraced former SO-12 (ChronoGuard) agent whose visage actually has the power to stop time.
The year is 1985, and the setting is an alternate England that is still the most powerful country on earth, has never known Winston Churchill, is at war with Wales on both a cold and a hot front, and is at war with the Russian Empire over the Crimean peninsula. The main character, Thursday Next, is a literary detective whose duties include guarding original manuscripts against zealous academics or would-be kidnappers and generally defending Britain’s obsessively bookish populace from the scourge of literary crimes. Her father is a time-stopping renegade temporal police officer, and her uncle Mycroft devised a pencil with a spell checker and is developing a sarcasm early-warning gadget. Next comes from a unique family.
When Acheron Hades (the third most terrible guy in the world) steals one of Mycroft’s inventions, a portal that allows you to figuratively step into or out of a book, Next has to prevent the kidnapping or murder of some of literature’s most renowned figures, including Jane Eyre. And keep in mind that this is only a basic summary of the story. We won’t even discuss the botched vampire hunt, the spacetime rift caused by the black hole that appears over the road, or the ongoing mystery of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
