The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde is a science fiction novel by default. It just doesn't fit into any other category - or rather it fits into too many categories to be anything but an SF book. No, wait, I take it all back. Any novel with super-powered villains, marvelous inventions, dodoes resurrected by genetic engineering, and a man who travels through time to fix problems caused by militant historical revisionists - well, that has to be SF, right?
Primarily, however, The Eyre Affair is an adventure novel. Our plucky heroine, Thursday Next, is trapped in a dead-end job that consists mostly of chasing down down Byronic verse forgers as a Special Operative in the literary division of the national police, when she is recruited by the super-secret SpecOps-5 to help track down master criminal Acheron Hades. Why her? Once, while in college, she turned down a date with Hades, so she is one of the few people - alive - who can identify him. In an alternate world that is as obsessed with great literature as ours is with sports, Hades has some fiendish designs on Martin Chuzzlewit and he plans the kidnapping of Jane Eyre, right out of her novel.
Reduced to its plot, the book is a simple, but fun, adventure that reminds me of some Keith Laumer books of the 1960s. An ordinary guy is plucked from his surroundings and plopped into the middle of a great and secret plot where he must rise to the overly daunting challenge, drawing on talents he never knew he had. The book follows this formula faithfully. Except - except for the confluence of many diverse literary formulae that sets this book apart.
For one thing, our plucky heroine is no longer young. In fact, she is rapidly approaching the other side of middle age, and dreaded spinsterhood. There is a lot more of Next's internal musing on romance and potential suitors than one finds in your run-of-the-mill adventure novel. There is a lot of fun with the great works of literature (gang wars over the legalization of surrealism!). Your typical reader of adventure fiction is not expected to know much about 19th century literature.
What Fforde has created, if it were translated to the big screen, might just be that elusive amalgam of the "guy film" and the "chick flick." Arnold, with a big gun, runs around blowing things up while being chased by Helena Bonham Carter, wearing her brocaded dress over her farthingale and impossibly tight corset as she stares at Arnold longingly and looking remotely disconsolate. All with the wit and humor of one of the good James Bond movies.
Fforde's world is complex, exciting, fun, and a great read. It is populated with bizarre characters with even more bizarre names (like the mysterious corporation agent: Jack Schitt). The book leaves you rapacious for more. Fortunately, Fforde has created a great website devoted to this world. And, in true James Bond fashion, Thursday Next will return in Lost in a Good Book, the first in what I'm sure will be a long sequence of sequels.
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