Jasper Fforde's "The Eyre Affair"

Fforde's Thursday Next series is another one of those that's been on my list for quite awhile. The front page quote on this first novel gushes, "Filled with clever wordplay, literary allusion, and bibliowit, The Eyre Affair  combines elements of Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But its quirky charm is all its own." What's not to like, right? And it was a series, so what's not to like in multiple volumes, right? Well, meh.

I will say in its defense that I enjoyed the so-called bibliowit. Fforde imagines a world where books are the most important pop culture aspect of life, and perhaps even more important than we consider pop culture today. People get into riots over who wrote the Shakespeare plays and Baconians (people who argue it was Sir Francis Bacon) go door-to-door evangelizing. The England Fforde imagines is still embroiled in the Crimean war and almost resembles a happier version of 1984. A Special Operations Network was invented to handle "policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force." The SpecOps, as it's called, ranges from the mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going into Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). "Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common konwledge that the ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9." Time travel was relatively common. Thursday's father once belonged to the ChronoGuard until he went on the run, jumping through time to avoid being caught by his former comrades, popping in and out of Thursday's life. Thursday works as a LiteraTec in SO-27. Along with the cultural importance placed on litearture in this world, author's homes and museums become shrines, fraud is lucrative (and therefore requires extensive policing) and manuscripts become hot commodities.

The basic plot of this first novel revolves around the theft of the manuscript of Jane Eyre, a device that allows people to jump into books, and a terrorist who threatens to change the plotline of the novel (which, because it is the manuscript, will change all subsequent editions) if his self-aggrandizing requests are not met. In my experience, fantasy/sci-fi novels can be good for two reasons: a fascinating world  that is either complete (fantasy) or plausibly and interestingly explained (sci-fi); or engrossing characters who pull you in and make you disregard gaps in the imagined world. In my opinion, The Eyre Affair does not meet either of these options. It was a moderately enjoyable read, but the world was only gestured at (it might have suffered from too closely resembling the modern world, which left me wondering which things were different and which were the same, amplifying the gaps), and the characters were not engrossing. The romance was bare-bones and tacked on as an after thought, which made me wonder why it was included at all. Maybe an editor said, "Jasper, if you're going to have a female protagonist, she needs to have a love interest and end happily married," but in my opinion that only detracted from the novel in my opinion. It was a fine summer read, but I very much doubt I'll return to any of the rest of the series or recommend in the future.