The Eyre Affair
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| UK Paperback Cover of The Eyre Affair. | |
| Author | Jasper Fforde |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | A Thursday Next Novel |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy |
| Publisher | Viking Adult |
| Released | 2001 |
| Media Type | |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-340-82576-6 |
| Followed by | Lost in a Good Book |
The Eyre Affair, published in 2001, is the first novel published by Jasper Fforde. It is the story of literary detective Thursday Next's pursuit of a master criminal through an alternative 1985 and through the pages of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
[edit] Plot summary
In this parallel world, England and Imperial Russia have fought the Crimean War for more than a century; England itself is a police state run by the Goliath Corporation (a powerful weapon-producing company with questionable morals); Wales is a separate, socialist nation; and literary questions (especially the question of Shakespearean authorship) are debated in the streets and the subject of gang wars and murder. Maintaining the integrity of English literary heritage is important enough for a special branch of the police, SpecOps-27, to be devoted to it.
Single, thirty-something, Crimean War veteran and literary detective Thursday Next lives in London with her pet dodo, Pickwick. As the story begins, Thursday is called upon to investigate the theft of the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, a childhood favorite, because of an experience she had when she visited the manuscript earlier--she actually entered the novel. During this strange flashback, she met the romantic lead of the novel, Edward Rochester, just before Rochester meets Jane. Thursday's appearance results in a minor change to the plot of the book that improves it slightly. In this parallel world, Jane Eyre has a different ending than in our world: Jane marries her cousin St. John Rivers and moves with him to India to become a missionary.
As part of the investigation, Thursday is temporarily promoted to SpecOps-5 to help them apprehend their suspect, the third most wanted criminal in the world, Acheron Hades (a hell of a guy); because he was one of her professors at university, she is one of the few people that actually knows what he looks like. Using her prior knowledge of Hades, she comes close to capturing him, but is badly injured in the attempt, and is saved only by a copy of Jane Eyre in her pocket that stops a bullet. Due to a strange blurring of the line between reality and fiction, Rochester helps support her until the paramedics arrive, leaving an embroidered handkerchief and jacket behind.
While recovering in the hospital, Thursday encounters her future self, who tells her, "Take the LiteraTec job in Swindon!" So she accepts the apparently unexciting transfer to the office in her old home town. Back at home, she catches up with her mother Wednesday, her Uncle Mycroft (the name of Sherlock Holmes' older, smarter brother), and her Aunt Polly. Mycroft is an inventor of literary technology. He has created bookworms that eat the words of books, translating carbon-paper (you write something in English, and the copy is in any other language you wish, provided that you press hard enough), and most importantly, the Prose Portal. This device allows people to step into the pages of any work of literature. Next also renews an acquaintance with her former fiancé Landen Parke-Laine (a reference to the British version of the board game Monopoly).
Next learns that Hades has kidnapped Mycroft, Polly, and the Prose Portal in order to blackmail the literary world by changing their favorite novels. Any change in the original manuscript of a novel results in all copies of that novel being changed. In order to demonstrate the power of the Portal, Hades removes Mr. Quaverley, a minor character from the original manuscript of Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit; when his demands are not met, he kills him -- altering the text of every copy of the novel. (In reality, there was never any such character in Martin Chuzzlewit.)
Next and a loathsome Goliath Corporation operative named Jack Schitt (what does he know?) trace Hades to the Socialist Republic of Wales. They rescue Mycroft and the Prose Portal, but find that Polly has disappeared, and Hades has gone into the original text of Jane Eyre. Next decides to pursue Hades into the text, and after much trouble, she succeeds in catching him and finishing him off. In the process however Hades sets fire to Thornfield Hall, Rochester's manor, resulting in its destruction, the death of Rochester's first wife, Bertha, and Rochester being grievously injured. In the aftermath Rochester and Jane get married; accidentally, Next has changed the ending of the book (to the ending that we know and love in our world).
Returning to her own world, Next uses the Prose Portal to release her Aunt Polly from a Wordsworth poem and to imprison Jack Schitt in the text of Poe's "The Raven". Next and Parke-Laine are reconciled and get married.
At the wedding, Thursday's father turns up. He is a renegade agent from SpecOps-12, the ChronoGuard (see Chronology protection conjecture). He temporarily stops time in order to dispense some fatherly advice to his daughter. The novel ends with Next facing an uncertain future at work: public reaction to the "new" ending for Jane Eyre is positive, but she has broken one of the cardinal Litera-Tec rules by changing the text.
The series continues with Lost in a Good Book.
[edit] References
- Hateley, Erica, "The End of The Eyre Affair: Jane Eyre, Parody, and Popular Culture", Journal of Popular Culture, 38:6 (2005 Nov), pp. 1022-36, ISSN 0022-3840
- Horstkotte, Martin, The Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary British Fiction, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004, ISBN 3-88476-679-1
- Horstkotte, Martin, "The Worlds of the Fantastic Other in Postmodern English Fiction", Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 14:3 (2003 Fall), pp. 318-32, ISSN 0897-0521
- Lusty, Heather, "Struggling to Remember: War, Trauma, and the Adventures of Thursday Next", Popular Culture Review, 16:2 (2005 Summer), pp. 117-29, ISSN 1060-8125
[edit] External links
- Fforde Grand Central
- Website of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire
- Web news magazine of the Brontë Parsonage Museum
| Novels by Jasper Fforde | |
| Thursday Next series | |
|---|---|
| The Eyre Affair | Lost in a Good Book | The Well of Lost Plots | Something Rotten | First Among Sequels (unpublished, due July 2007) | |
| Jack Spratt series | |
| The Big Over Easy | The Fourth Bear | |
