Jasper Fforde. The Eyre Affair. New York: Viking, 2002. Print.
After reading and enjoying The Fourth Bear, I saw that Fforde had written some other novels with characters from classic tales. Since I have taught Jane Eyre for years, I decided to read The Eyre Affair.
I confess that while reading through much of the novel, I was becoming disappointed. It had many rabbit trails and seemingly useless details. While it did have numerous allusions, they did not seem to be as funny or as clever as those in The Fourth Bear.
Having said all that, and anticipating writing a lukewarm review, the last four chapters made the slog through the first thirty or so worth it. The climax was great. It was nearly original. It made me laugh. It brought tears to my eyes. Yes, reader, I enjoyed it, after all.
The Eyre Affair is set in an alternate Great Britain of 1985. Wales has been independent since the middle of the nineteenth century. Its nominal ruler is Owain Glyndwr VII (Owen Glendower to Shakespeare fans). In the twentieth century, a dictator by the name of Ulyanov (Lenin’s actual family name) has turned it into the People’s Republic of Wales.
This has complicated relations with England because the Crimean War is still going on 131 years later. Like the Medieval Hundred Years’ War, there is not always fighting going on, but hostilities between Britain and Russia persist.
If Wales has become an Iron Curtain country, England represents crony capitalism at its worst. The Goliath Corporation is really the shadow government. If Goliath does not support it, it does not get done. Goliath has its hand in most businesses and even has its own security forces that often tell government forces what to do.
Protagonist and narrator Thursday Next is a member of British Special Operations, SpecOps, or just SO. There are thirty divisions of SpecOps, with a hierarchy beginning at SO-1 (the top) down to SO-30. SO-20 and below are classified. Thursday works in SO-27, the Literary Detective Division, LiteraTec for short.
LiteraTecs track down literary crimes such as bogus manuscripts and changes to literary works. An ongoing investigation involves the authorship of the Shakespeare plays. Here we meet Baconians, Marlovians, and Oxonians. Fforde’s “solution” to the problem is straight out of Heinlein—or maybe Mark Twain. (Some folks take Twain too seriously, missing the point that his essay supporting Francis Bacon as the author of the plays is a satire.)
This can become serious, though, because in this version of England, time travel is possible. Thursday’s father is SO-12 or ChronoGuard. He appears for minutes at a time as he travels in the past and future to insure that history is not altered too much. Even though missions of SO-20 and below are classified, Miss Next knows what SO-12 does because of her father and his lifestyle.
Some of the problems, then, that LiteraTecs investigate involve people who have traveled in the past to alter works of literature.
A bigger problem is that it is possible for people to travel into works of literature directly and affect them. Next has an aunt who gets trapped for a while in the Lake Country by a field of daffodils with a flirtatious William Wordsworth.
The nemesis of LiteraTec is Acheron Hades, a person with unexplained superpowers. Even his name suggests evil. He has stolen the original manuscript of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit from a museum. This is serious, because if he alters the original, then the stories in all editions change as well. Hades does not like the book. He has already deleted one character from it, and is thinking of deleting Mr. Chuzzlewit himself if his demands are not met.
Not only do LiteraTecs get involved, but so do agents of the Goliath Corporation including a guy by the name of Jack Schitt, who lives up to his name. Goliath does not like Hades, but they are not too fond of SO-27, either.
One reason that the book rambles for a long while is that the author had to set up his alternate world.
Although Jane Eyre is hinted at early when Next discovers a handkerchief with the initials EFR (Edward de Fairfax Rochester), the real Jane Eyre action does not begin until about two thirds or three quarters of the way through the novel.
Without going into too much detail, the novel Jane Eyre in this world has the same first person narrative that we know until Jane leaves Rochester after the wedding is canceled. In this alternate world, Jane marries St. John Rivers and accompanies him to India.
Thursday’s Uncle Mycroft Next has come up with a more efficient way of traveling into texts that Hades wants to use for his own nefarious purposes and that the Goliath people want to exploit to make money. Mycroft’s method involves bookworms.
Oh, and a Japanese tour guide has found a portal that takes her to Millcote and Thornfield so she leads tours to these places. She assiduously avoids Jane Eyre herself so that she does not appear in her narratives.
Fforde has been compared to Douglas Adams. With the time travel and literary investigations, The Eyre Affair seems to have been inspired by Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Indeed one plot complication in the novel is solved in a manner similar to the way Dirk Gently solves the mystery of the visitor from Porlock in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”
Even though at that point I said to myself, That’s just like Douglas Adams, that was also around the time the story started getting good. It all comes together in the end.
Obviously, it helps to have read some Shakespeare and Charlotte Bronte. There is one hilarious scene of an audience participation version of Richard III. If anyone has ever attended a Sound of Music singalong or some version of the Rocky Horror Show, this is like those things.
Yes, the slog has lighter moments to keep the reader going, and occasionally when a literary figure or fictional character appears in the real world [air quotes], it is a reminder that The Eyre Affair is ultimately worth the time.
Reader, she married him [grin].