The Eyre Affair

2021 re-read: Just as delightful a read as it was the first time I read it 6 years ago. This book has the absurdity of Douglas Adams, the humour of Terry Pratchett, and with a healthy dose of classic literature references thrown into the mix. Fforde's writing style is always so engaging and easy, and I also love how short and sweet each chapter was. This book was just so easy to breeze through.

In an alternate universe where timey-wimey things happen (and where the Crimean War is still ongoing well into the 1980s), Thursday Next is a Special Operations exec - specifically in SO-27 as a LiteraTec (Literary Detective). In this world, having a stance on who really wrote Shakespeare's plays is as serious a business as a political leaning and could well get people arrested and charged. Thursday Next is called upon for help against her ex-lecturer-turned-master-villain, Acheron Hades, who is threatening beloved literary characters like Martin Chuzzlewit and, for his coup de grace, Jane Eyre.

The action is non-stop in this book. There's something happening in every chapter. There's some nugget and gem of literary humour on every page. Every character has at least an awesome name, such as Mycroft Next, Thursday's sometimes-genius uncle, and her eventual boss, Victor Analogy. Even the villain, believably threatening and sinister though he was, had some degree of charisma. “I'm not mad, I'm just differently moralled,” he quips.

The only perhaps downside that may not be everyone's cup of tea is that all the different threads that do come together in the end may be just a bit too overwhelming for some. Because this is a world very much like our own but with just tiny details that are different, a lot of readers unfamiliar with the whole history of the Crimean War and the Light Armoured Brigade might feel completely at sea. I'm one of this number, having barely any knowledge on the above, but I still found that I was able to keep up with whatever was happening as long as you don't think too hard about the timey-wimey stuff.

About the ending: I also get that the book was, in a way, supposed to slightly parallel Jane Eyre in how Thursday initially rejects Landen, but then stopped his wedding to Daisy Mutlar in the same style Jane Eyre's wedding to Rochester is interrupted, and then later on marries Landen herself. Bowden Cable, who is supposed to be a St. John Rivers parallel, initially proposes to Thursday and invites her to go with him to Ohio as his wife or assistant, to which she briefly considers - again, like Jane. However, I kinda found myself rooting for Bowden way more than Landen! For one, he certainly appears a lot more in the novel than Landen does, he does a lot more to actually support Thursday through the action of the novel, and I thought it was pretty shitty that, immediately after getting rejected by Thursday, Landen just goes ahead to propose to and very nearly goes ahead with getting married with Daisy Mutlar. Would he have just gone through with it if it hadn't been found out that she was actually already married?! I just can't get behind it tbh.

Overall, this is a huge recommendation for anyone who's a fan of Dickens, Jane Eyre, classic literature overall, and an absurd sense of humour.