In the world of Thursday Next, literature is taken very, very seriously. Ruthless thugs traffic in fake first editions; troublesome Baconians go door to door to argue their theories on who really wrote Shakespeare's plays; poetry lovers change names to reflect their loyalties: "Following an incident in a pub where the assailant, victim, witness, landlord, arresting officer and judge had all been called Alfred Tennyson, a law had been passed compelling each namesake to carry a registration number." Literary detectives, of which Thursday is one, keep an eye out for any infractions in this "1984"-ish Britain. But no agent of the Special Operations Network has ever dealt with the heinous crimes about to be perpetrated by Acheron Hades, archvillain, murderer, time traveler and all-around bad guy. His evil plan? To kidnap Jane Eyre right from the pages of Charlotte Bronte's book.

The idea of literary abduction is only one of the wildly inventive notions in Jasper Fforde's genre-busting, whoppingly imaginative first novel. "The Eyre Affair" (Viking, 384 pages, $23.95) is packed with literary allusions and enough sci-fi time-hopping to evoke the frenetic best work of the late Douglas Adams.

Thursday's crackpot Uncle Mycroft has invented the means by which Hades hopes to achieve his goal. His Prose Portal will transport anyone into any literary work. As a test, he sends his wife, Polly, into "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and promptly gets jealous of her roam through the daffodils with a semi-lecherous William Wordsworth.

Hades traps Polly in the poem to force Mycroft to turn over the Prose Portal so he can sneak into Dickens' manuscript of "Martin Chuzzlewit" -- the Portal, you see, only works on originals -- and kidnap and kill a Quaverley. "If you had read Martin Chuzzlewit prior to 1985 you would have come across a minor character who lived in Mrs. Todger's boarding house," writes Fforde. "Sadly, he is no longer there. His hat is hanging on the hat rack at the bottom of page 235, but that is all that remains. . . ." Hades wouldn't mind getting rid of that whiny Hamlet, and he briefly considers a disruption of Jane Austen's Bennet family but finds Jane Eyre too irresistible to pass up.

"The Eyre Affair" does become too convoluted; sideplots drag, and some characters feel like afterthoughts. But you simply can't complain about a book in which a performance of "Richard III" takes on "Rocky Horror Picture Show" proportions, with some audience members drafted to play the parts and the rest reacting with quips, shouts and jokes.

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