A Little Too Much Sweet Madness: The Eyre Affair

I really wanted to love this book. I really did. The premise is so wacky and wonderful that I wish I’d thought of it myself. In Jasper Fforde’s alternate-universe version of 1980s England, in addition to cloning extinct animals as pets (dodos are a favorite) and traveling in dirigibles (with the cost of gas lately, maybe hydrogen-powered air travel wouldn’t be such a bad idea), people take literature very, very seriously. The Shakespeare authorship question is nearly as hot a topic as politics and religion, with Baconians pleading their case door-to-door in a manner reminiscent of political campaigners or Jehovah’s Witnesses. There are gang wars over impressionism. Books are so highly valued that a vast black market in poetic forgeries has sprung up, and the problem is so great that an entire Special Ops unit, the LiteraTecs, is dedicated to cracking down on literature-related crimes. Britain may be ruled by a totalitarian puppet-government controlled by the shady mega-conglomerate, the Goliath Corporation, but people care so much about literature in Fforde’s England that I think I’d still love to live there. Give me a ticket for the next dirigible to Swindon!

From early on, The Eyre Affair promises to follow the literary hijinks of Thursday Next, a literary detective who’s tracking Acheron Hades, the third most-wanted criminal in the world whose current plot involves kidnapping and then ransoming or murdering beloved characters from English literature (Hades is so evil that he doesn’t much care which he ends up doing). Oh yeah, did I mention that people from Fforde’s “real” England can physically enter fictional narratives? Various characters literally lose themselves in good books with the help of the Prose Portal, the invention of Thursday’s eccentric Uncle Mycroft. As I mentioned earlier, this premise is so unique and clever that it could offset a lot of imperfections. At the same time, though, the premise is so great that I feel like it deserved to be executed better than it was in The Eyre Affair. I had two major problems with this novel: the book’s pacing, within the overall structure of the novel and within individual scenes, and the author’s shying away from really capitalizing on the fun and havoc that entering into the world of a beloved novel could create.

I often felt while reading The Eyre Affair that the inventiveness that allowed Fforde to create such an incredibly bizarre, quirky fictional world was also his greatest stumbling block. The Eyre Affair is full of great oddities and details, but sometimes it gets so full of details that the novel feels overcrowded. For example, Thursday is a Crimean War veteran (yes, the Crimean War went a little differently in Fforde’s world than it did in ours), and several subplots intersect with Thursday’s military service, including an important one involving a Big Brother-esque military-industrial complex called the Goliath Corporation. However, additional Crimean complications concerning Thursday’s ex, Landen Park-Laine, and especially her former commanding officer, the blustery but rather unentertaining Colonel Phelps, make it feel like too much burden is being placed on a story that’s really tangential to the main mystery and chase after Hades. The shuffling around of the pieces of Thursday’s life after the sleuth’s explosive initial meeting with supervillain Hades really slows the book down, and though lots of the small, everyday scenes that occur during this phase of the novel are interesting, they’re not quite interesting enough to merit the inclusion of all of them.

This same problem happens within scenes as well. For instance, in the scene in which the brilliant, crazy Uncle Mycroft introduces Thursday to two of his inventions that will be vital to the rest of the novel, the Prose Portal and the Book Worms, he also shows Thursday nearly a dozen other invention, which, although they all carry their own punch lines, never reappear in any significant role in the novel. Picking one or two of these humorous inventions to describe along with the two important ones would have served Fforde’s purposes just as well and I think probably would have made the remaining jokes even funnier. This scene and others really demonstrate an embarrassment of riches; Fforde easily could have saved many of these delightful details for later books so each detail gets its turn to really shine.

The Eyre Affair’s other major shortcoming is its handling of characters traveling into other books. The premise of sending Fforde’s colorful characters to wreak havoc in classic literature is so wonderful that I really wanted to spend some time with Thursday and the others in these books. However, after two very brief intersections between Thursday and gothic heartthrob Edward Fairfax Rochester, it takes forever to get Thursday back into Jane Eyre. Once Thursday does make it to Bronte’s windswept moors, even though it’s vital that Thursday avoid interacting too much with Jane Eyre herself and risk changing the narrative too much (although she does end up having an impact on the novel’s conclusion), Fforde wastes an opportunity for the great fun of Thursday at least mingling with some of Jane Eyre’s minor characters by kicking her out of Thornfield and having her stay at a nearby inn. Also–and this is probably the one flaw I absolutely cannot forgive–though Fforde’s take on Jane feels true to the spirit of the character in Bronte’s book, his Rochester is unforgivably bland for my tastes. He’s a bit too much like Thursday’s beau Landen (I think that might be the point): the perfect romantic hero with just a touch of sadness instead of the loving, complex, good at heart but still deeply screwed up and damaged character that Bronte crafted so brilliantly.

All in all, I’d only recommend this book to hardcore bibliophiles, especially if you like sci-fi, sleuthing, and Shakespeare (and really, who doesn’t?). The premise has great potential, and the author has an incredible imagination; I just wish the finished product had been edited more tightly. I saw on Amazon.com that The Eyre Affair was only the first novel in a series of Thursday Next books, so I may have to check out one of the sequels to see if Fforde improves his pacing while maintaining his creativity and wit.