The very first thing that strikes the reader of Jasper Fforde's first novel, "The Eyre Affair," is just how much he has filched from movies, television shows and other books. As in "The X-Files," government agents do battle with vampiric villains, shape-shifting evildoers and an assortment of supernatural phenomena. As in Woody Allen's short story "The Kugelmass Episode," people are able to pop themselves into novels, while fictional creations are able to escape into the real world. And as in Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide" series, zany high jinks ‹ lifted, in turn, from Lewis Carroll, Kurt Vonnegut and Monty Python ‹ proliferate with good-natured, if highly deliberate abandon.

In the opening chapters of "The Eyre Affair," Mr. Fforde struggles to put all these elements into play, while clumsily laying out the exposition to his story. He seems to gain in confidence as he goes along, however, and in the second portion of the novel, the cloud of derivativeness slowly lifts, as the reader begins to feel immersed in a distinctive and entertaining fictional world.

Although the year is 1985 and the place is Britain, this world exists in an alternate universe of sorts. A war with Russia has been raging in Crimea for some 130 years. A military- industrial behemoth named the Goliath Corporation functions as a kind of shadow government in England. Extinct animals like the dodo are popular pets. And literature is everyone's favorite pastime.

Rabid, costume-attired fans assemble every weekend to attend "Rocky Horror Show"-like performances of "Richard III." A ferocious debate about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays permeates all layers of society. Riots have broken out among neo-Surrealists celebrating the anniversary of the legalization of Surrealism. And fortunes can be made in the forgery of famous authors' works.

Monitoring literary crimes is the job of a group of literary detectives known as the LiteraTecs, one of whom is Mr. Fforde's heroine with the decidedly Chestertonian name of Thursday Next.

Poised on the brink of middle age and estranged from the man she loves, Thursday is part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew and part Dirty Harry. As a former member of the elite SpecOps-5 squad, she is licensed to kill, and she has few scruples about shooting first, especially when it comes to her archnemesis, the nefarious Acheron Hades, a former English professor turned all- purpose criminal, a villain so villainous that "he can lie in thought, deed, action and appearance." Hades, who has already killed 42 times, can morph into other people, be it an old woman or Rochester from "Jane Eyre." He is also impervious to bullets and capable of draining adversaries of their will power.

Hades not only turns out to be behind the theft of a valuable manuscript of Dickens's "Martin Chuzzlewit," but he also seems to have masterminded the abduction of Thursday's uncle Mycroft, the inventor of something called the Prose Portal, which offers people the opportunity to leap into the pages of a novel, much the way the portal in "Being John Malkovich" offered them the chance to download themselves into another person's mind. The machine is coveted by the Goliath Corporation, which wants to use it to profit further from the Crimean War, and by Hades, who has the murder of certain literary characters in mind.

Already, Hades has killed a minor character from "Martin Chuzzlewit," and he intends to move in on bigger prey if huge ransoms are not paid by lovers of literature. When he succeeds in stealing the original manuscript of "Jane Eyre," it is up to Thursday to thwart his dastardly plans for the hero and heroine of that novel.

Although Hades and the rest of the supporting cast of "The Eyre Affair" are all cartoonish folk ‹ a sort of cross between the goodies and baddies in a James Bond film and the stock characters from a Victorian melodrama ‹ they gradually emerge as useful foils to the driven Thursday, who acts more and more like a conflicted yuppie when she isn't in her gun-packing Clint Eastwood mode.

As for Mr. Fforde's narration, it picks up velocity and interest as the book progresses. The gratuitous whimsy that was so cloying in the early chapters gradually gives way to genuinely clever invention, just as the literary jokes ‹ which run the gamut from bad puns (one character is named Millon de Floss) to postmodern capers ‹ slowly evolve from knee-jerk spasms of humor into a larger, comedic point of view.

A good editor might have trimmed away some of the annoying padding of this novel and helped the author to assimilate his heavy borrowings from other artists, but no matter: by the end of the novel, Mr. Fforde has, however belatedly, found his own exuberant voice.