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There is another 1985, somewhere in the could-have-been, where dodos are regenerated in home-cloning kits and everyone is disappointed by the ending of Jane Eyre. But in this world there are policemen who can travel across time, a Welsh republic - and a woman called Thursday Next.
Kerian: If for some reason you read The Eyre Affair without having read Jane Eyre, I definitely recommend it. It will certainly be interesting to read and is a very good book.
coliemta: One's more literary and the other more science-fiction-y, but they're both bizarre, hilarious and similar in feel. Most people who like one will enjoy the other.
ten_floors_up: This and the other books in the Aberystwyth series share a specifically British alternative universe, and a dollop of entertainingly twisted literary pastiche.
SimoneA: While one is about travelling through time and the other about travelling through books, the atmosphere of these book (series) is very similar, with a strong female lead and a crazy set of side characters.
timtom: If you wish more literary characters escaped the pages of their books to mingle in our own contemporary reality, head to Wellington, New Zealand where Dickensian villains might just about destroy everything...
Dr.Science: The English author Tom Holt is relatively unknown in America, but very popular in England. If you enjoy Jasper Fforde or Christopher Moore you will most certainly enjoy Tom Holt's wry sense of English humor and the absurd. He has written a number of excellent books but they will be difficult to find at your library.… (més)
A re-read, having read this some years ago, and unfortunately I think I enjoyed it more the first time around. There are shedloads of ideas: an alternative history in which Germany occupied Britain in WWII, the Crimean war has persisted until 1985 with 'hot' periods, in one of which the heroine, Thursday Next, won a bravery medal for saving comrades but didn't manage to save her brother Anton, and a Goliath Corporation that controls the government and society. There us also organised time travel by a special operations unit.
Thursday is a detective in another special operations division which deals with literary crime, and this alternative society is art-mad, with people lionising dead poets such as Milton to the point of changing their names to match, and riots breaking out between surealists and adherents to representational art. Genetic engineering is so advanced that extinct species such as dodos have been brought back as pets, although there are only a few aeroplanes and most travel is by airship (at least until we reach book 2 in the series). Thursday's uncle Mycroft is a genius inventor in the Professor Branestawm line and one of his inventions, the Prose Portal, in conjunction with the bookworms he engineers, allows real people to travel into works of literature, but things go wrong when a villain Acheron Hades steals the device, kidnaps Mycroft (and his wife Polly who is trapped in a Wordsworth poem by the action) and then holds the world to ransom by killing off a minor Dickensian character and ultimately kidnapping Jane Eyre.
On paper that's a lot to like. And yet ... the use of silly names for everyone does get a bit wearing after a while. None of the characters seems real, they are all quite cardboard including Thursday herself so you don't feel involved in her various predicaments. The villain is evil because he likes being evil. The Prose Portal isn't really such, or it wouldn't work for poetry either. The constant witty inventiveness grates after a while - a Rocky Horror type version of Richard III for example, is one of the things just thrown in to pep up the mix and perhaps disguise the fact that the plot and characterisation are thin. And the cliches extend into scenes such as when the heroine looks into a mirror so she can describe herself. Plus it is meant to be her story from her POV and yet there is constant head hopping or describing things from the POV of other characters when she isn't present. There is a 'will they, won't they' subplot with an old flame who Thursday busted up with 10 years before due to his testifying to the military that her brother caused the disaster - a more modern Charge of the Light Brigade - in which he and others died and the old flame lost a leg - when he pointed to the wrong valley, only here it happened in 1975 and is the 'Charge of the Light Armoured Brigade'. There is too much inventiveness really, with things rushed or mentioned in passing, and no real development to the characters or the world, perhaps because the world can't really made to work and would be obviously nonfunctional if there was more of a focus on all the zany details.
So despite the dodos which I love this can only reach a 3 star rating. ( )
Oh how to review this? [return][return]Tuesday Next lives in the alternative version of Swindon, with her parents (her father is a Time Agent so keeps popping up at various ages at various points in her life) and her pet dodo.[return][return]She becomes a "literary agent" - which is not what it sounds. It means there are books (those that already exist, those that could have existed but dont and those that will exist), and it's her job to keep things straight and true to form. In this story, someone is trying to change the story of "Jane Eyre" and so Tuesday needs to go in and sort it out. [return][return]It's useful to have a resonable knowledge of literature - not just Jane Eyre - but you dont have to know all the stories brilliantly to understand what's going on. (e.g. in a later book there is mass confusion - even between the characters themselves - when a bunch of Russian characters from Tolstoy turn up. You dont need to know Tolstoy, just that everyone has at least 3 different names and it's very hard to keep track of who is who).
Fforde wears the marks of his literary forebears proudly on his sleeve, from Lewis Carroll and Wodehouse to Douglas Adams and Monty Python, in both inventiveness and sense of fun.
afegit per Katya0133 | editaYale Review, David Galef(Oct 1, 2008)
Fforde delivers almost every sentence with a sly wink, and he's got an easy way with wordplay, trivia and inside jokes. ''The Eyre Affair'' can be too clever by half, and fiction like this is certainly an acquired taste, but Fforde's verve is rarely less than infectious.
A good editor might have trimmed away some of the annoying padding of this novel and helped the author to assimilate his heavy borrowings from other artists, but no matter: by the end of the novel, Mr. Fforde has, however belatedly, found his own exuberant voice.
THE EYRE AFFAIR is mostly a collection of jokes, conceits and puzzles. It's smart, frisky and sheer catnip for former English majors....And some of the jokes are clever indeed.
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
For my father John Standish Fforde 1920-2000
Who never knew I was to be published but would have been most proud nonetheless —and not a little surprised.
Primeres paraules
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
My father had a face that could stop a clock.
Citacions
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning. (Victor to Thursday)
Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.
It was a glorious sunny day, and the airship droned past the small puffy clouds that punctuated the sky like a flock of aerial sheep.
He wore thick glasses and mismatched clothes and his face was a moonscape of healed acne.
"You shot him six times in the face." The dying killer smiled. "That I remember." "Six times! Why?" Felix7 frowned and started to shiver. "Six was all I had," he answered simply.
His breathing became more labored and finally stopped altogether. "Shit!" "That's Mr. Schitt to you, Next!" said a voice behind us. We turned to see my second-least favorite person and two of his minders.
"Bullshit, Schitt."
"Is it worth the life of two officers?" "Most certainly. SpecOps officers die pointlessly every day. If we can, we should try our best to make those deaths worthwhile."
"And if you want a piece of advice, go easy with Jack Schitt. We hear the man's a psychopath." "Thanks for the tip, Franklin," I said. "I'd never have noticed."
Toad News anchorwoman somberly announced that a young surrealist had been killed—stabbed to death by a gang adhering to a radical school of French impressionists.
"I'm not mad, I'm just...well, differently moraled, that's all.
Darreres paraules
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
There is another 1985, somewhere in the could-have-been, where dodos are regenerated in home-cloning kits and everyone is disappointed by the ending of Jane Eyre. But in this world there are policemen who can travel across time, a Welsh republic - and a woman called Thursday Next.
)
Google Books — S'està carregant…
***Group Read: The Eyre Affair
11
Thursday is a detective in another special operations division which deals with literary crime, and this alternative society is art-mad, with people lionising dead poets such as Milton to the point of changing their names to match, and riots breaking out between surealists and adherents to representational art. Genetic engineering is so advanced that extinct species such as dodos have been brought back as pets, although there are only a few aeroplanes and most travel is by airship (at least until we reach book 2 in the series). Thursday's uncle Mycroft is a genius inventor in the Professor Branestawm line and one of his inventions, the Prose Portal, in conjunction with the bookworms he engineers, allows real people to travel into works of literature, but things go wrong when a villain Acheron Hades steals the device, kidnaps Mycroft (and his wife Polly who is trapped in a Wordsworth poem by the action) and then holds the world to ransom by killing off a minor Dickensian character and ultimately kidnapping Jane Eyre.
On paper that's a lot to like. And yet ... the use of silly names for everyone does get a bit wearing after a while. None of the characters seems real, they are all quite cardboard including Thursday herself so you don't feel involved in her various predicaments. The villain is evil because he likes being evil. The Prose Portal isn't really such, or it wouldn't work for poetry either. The constant witty inventiveness grates after a while - a Rocky Horror type version of Richard III for example, is one of the things just thrown in to pep up the mix and perhaps disguise the fact that the plot and characterisation are thin. And the cliches extend into scenes such as when the heroine looks into a mirror so she can describe herself. Plus it is meant to be her story from her POV and yet there is constant head hopping or describing things from the POV of other characters when she isn't present. There is a 'will they, won't they' subplot with an old flame who Thursday busted up with 10 years before due to his testifying to the military that her brother caused the disaster - a more modern Charge of the Light Brigade - in which he and others died and the old flame lost a leg - when he pointed to the wrong valley, only here it happened in 1975 and is the 'Charge of the Light Armoured Brigade'. There is too much inventiveness really, with things rushed or mentioned in passing, and no real development to the characters or the world, perhaps because the world can't really made to work and would be obviously nonfunctional if there was more of a focus on all the zany details.
So despite the dodos which I love this can only reach a 3 star rating. (