The Eyre Affair
by Jasper Fforde | Science Fiction & Fantasy | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 0142001805 Global Overview for this book
ISBN: 0142001805 Global Overview for this book
2 journalers for this copy...
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard.
Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.
Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel.
Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.
Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel.
Journal Entry 2 by AngelChild at The Stamford Arms, Stamford St in Waterloo, Greater London United Kingdom on Friday, April 22, 2005
Released 19 yrs ago (4/22/2005 UTC) at The Stamford Arms, Stamford St in Waterloo, Greater London United Kingdom
WILD RELEASE NOTES:
RELEASE NOTES:
Taking with me to the mini meet up tonight. Think LyzzyBee might want it, if not, it'll go into the OBCZ
Taking with me to the mini meet up tonight. Think LyzzyBee might want it, if not, it'll go into the OBCZ
Intercepted this book between CaffCaff and Lizzy-B at our mini meetup last week. Eager to read this...
Can't really improve on CaffCaff's summary - a fantastic, funny and brilliant book, which challenges all your perceptions of time, place and narrative fiction! Will definitely be re-reading this one! I loved the notion of the literary detectives sitting round, working in shifts to read "Jane Eyre" and Dickens and to monitor unusual activity in them!
Can't really improve on CaffCaff's summary - a fantastic, funny and brilliant book, which challenges all your perceptions of time, place and narrative fiction! Will definitely be re-reading this one! I loved the notion of the literary detectives sitting round, working in shifts to read "Jane Eyre" and Dickens and to monitor unusual activity in them!
New ISBN number for "The Eyre Affair" if you want the book cover picture...
Just found this ISBN number on Amazon.co.uk which should give you the correct book cover :-) Cos I can't edit the book details....!
034073356X
Just found this ISBN number on Amazon.co.uk which should give you the correct book cover :-) Cos I can't edit the book details....!
034073356X
I've just re-read this for the bookclub on the 19th, and it just gets better and better!
"As I so often say, if you have enjoyed my books then reserve half the praise for yourself - because you are the one who clothe my fantasy with reality." Jasper Fforde (from website)
Jasper Fforde website
Bookclub questions for "The Eyre Affair"
1. If you could jump right into any novel with Ms. Nakajima, which novel would you choose to visit? What classic novel endings have left you unsatisfied? What endings would you change if you had the power to do so?
2. Acheron Hades claims that pure evil is as rare as pure good. Do you think either exists in our world?
3. Two of the main plot devices—time travel and book jumping—illustrate the infinite possibilities of alternate endings. If you could travel through time, is there anything in history, either in the broad sense or in your own personal history, that you would go back and revise?
4. If you could choose Ms. Nakajima's ability to jump into novels, Thursday's father's ability to travel through time, or Acheron Hades' ability to defy mortality, which power would you choose to have and why?
5. Despite the fact that he is her one true love, Thursday holds a grudge against Landen Parke-Laine for over ten years because he betrayed her brother when they returned from the Crimean War. Whom do you think Thursday's first allegiance should have been to, her lover or her brother? Do you think her decision to return to Landen comes out of weakness or strength?
6. In the hands of villains like Jack Schitt and Acheron Hades, the Prose Portal could be exploited for villainous deeds, but it could also have been used to do good deeds such as producing a cure for terminal diseases. Would you choose to destroy the Prose Portal as Mycroft does without trying to extract good use out of it first? Do you think the risk of the destruction it could cause outweighs the possibilities for good?
7. Thursday's brother, the very Irreverend Joffy, tells her, "The first casualty of war is always truth." Do you think this is true? Why or why not?
8. Thursday says, "All my life I have felt destiny tugging at my sleeve. Few of us have any real idea what it is we are here to do and when it is that we are to do it. Every small act has a knock-on consequence that goes on to affect those about us in unseen ways. I was lucky that I had so clear a purpose." In a world where time is so pliable, can there be such a thing as destiny? Was there a defining moment in your life when you understood what your own purpose was?
9. Who is the worse villain, Acheron Hades or Jack Schitt? Which sentence do you think is worse—death by a silver bullet to the heart or an eternity trapped in Poe's "The Raven"?
Introduction to The Eyre Affair
Masterpiece Theatre meets James Bond in The Eyre Affair, the first novel in Jasper Fforde's cheeky sleuth series featuring a book-loving, gun-toting, wit-slinging heroine named Thursday Next. In Thursday's world, an alternate version of 1985 London, literature rules popular culture—audiences enact and participate in Richard III for Friday-night fun, thousands of visitors make literary pilgrimages to gawk at original manuscripts, and missionaries travel door-to-door heralding Francis Bacon as the true Bard.
The mysterious theft of the Martin Chuzzlewit original manuscript from the Dickens Museum catalyzes Thursday's transformation from humble library cop into intrepid literature savior. When Thursday's eccentric uncle Mycroft and aunt Polly are kidnapped along with their Prose Portal, an ingenious device that allows readers to physically enter the world of any book, the SpecOps literary division uncovers a dastardly plot to kidnap and murder characters from everyone's favorite novels. The criminal operation is helmed by Acheron Hades, the third most evil man in the world, a supreme villain who bends minds, shifts shapes, and remains impervious to most mortal weapons. Thursday and her SpecOps cohorts' mission to capture their slippery adversary is further complicated by the meddling of the pointedly named Jack Schitt, the despotic head of security at the hegemonic Goliath Corporation, whose investment in Hades' capture seems suspect. And when the perpetrators dare to steal the original Jane Eyre, Thursday must race to save one of the most beloved characters in English literature—and Brontë's classic love story itself—from eradication.
"As I so often say, if you have enjoyed my books then reserve half the praise for yourself - because you are the one who clothe my fantasy with reality." Jasper Fforde (from website)
Jasper Fforde website
Bookclub questions for "The Eyre Affair"
1. If you could jump right into any novel with Ms. Nakajima, which novel would you choose to visit? What classic novel endings have left you unsatisfied? What endings would you change if you had the power to do so?
2. Acheron Hades claims that pure evil is as rare as pure good. Do you think either exists in our world?
3. Two of the main plot devices—time travel and book jumping—illustrate the infinite possibilities of alternate endings. If you could travel through time, is there anything in history, either in the broad sense or in your own personal history, that you would go back and revise?
4. If you could choose Ms. Nakajima's ability to jump into novels, Thursday's father's ability to travel through time, or Acheron Hades' ability to defy mortality, which power would you choose to have and why?
5. Despite the fact that he is her one true love, Thursday holds a grudge against Landen Parke-Laine for over ten years because he betrayed her brother when they returned from the Crimean War. Whom do you think Thursday's first allegiance should have been to, her lover or her brother? Do you think her decision to return to Landen comes out of weakness or strength?
6. In the hands of villains like Jack Schitt and Acheron Hades, the Prose Portal could be exploited for villainous deeds, but it could also have been used to do good deeds such as producing a cure for terminal diseases. Would you choose to destroy the Prose Portal as Mycroft does without trying to extract good use out of it first? Do you think the risk of the destruction it could cause outweighs the possibilities for good?
7. Thursday's brother, the very Irreverend Joffy, tells her, "The first casualty of war is always truth." Do you think this is true? Why or why not?
8. Thursday says, "All my life I have felt destiny tugging at my sleeve. Few of us have any real idea what it is we are here to do and when it is that we are to do it. Every small act has a knock-on consequence that goes on to affect those about us in unseen ways. I was lucky that I had so clear a purpose." In a world where time is so pliable, can there be such a thing as destiny? Was there a defining moment in your life when you understood what your own purpose was?
9. Who is the worse villain, Acheron Hades or Jack Schitt? Which sentence do you think is worse—death by a silver bullet to the heart or an eternity trapped in Poe's "The Raven"?
Introduction to The Eyre Affair
Masterpiece Theatre meets James Bond in The Eyre Affair, the first novel in Jasper Fforde's cheeky sleuth series featuring a book-loving, gun-toting, wit-slinging heroine named Thursday Next. In Thursday's world, an alternate version of 1985 London, literature rules popular culture—audiences enact and participate in Richard III for Friday-night fun, thousands of visitors make literary pilgrimages to gawk at original manuscripts, and missionaries travel door-to-door heralding Francis Bacon as the true Bard.
The mysterious theft of the Martin Chuzzlewit original manuscript from the Dickens Museum catalyzes Thursday's transformation from humble library cop into intrepid literature savior. When Thursday's eccentric uncle Mycroft and aunt Polly are kidnapped along with their Prose Portal, an ingenious device that allows readers to physically enter the world of any book, the SpecOps literary division uncovers a dastardly plot to kidnap and murder characters from everyone's favorite novels. The criminal operation is helmed by Acheron Hades, the third most evil man in the world, a supreme villain who bends minds, shifts shapes, and remains impervious to most mortal weapons. Thursday and her SpecOps cohorts' mission to capture their slippery adversary is further complicated by the meddling of the pointedly named Jack Schitt, the despotic head of security at the hegemonic Goliath Corporation, whose investment in Hades' capture seems suspect. And when the perpetrators dare to steal the original Jane Eyre, Thursday must race to save one of the most beloved characters in English literature—and Brontë's classic love story itself—from eradication.
