Mad as pants. Yes truly, The Eyre Affair is mad a pants in the best, terrifically possible way. Having be dropped right smack into the action of The Woman Who Died a Lot (which was released earlier this year by Hodder and Stoughton) and being convinced that the Thursday Next series was a series that I really wanted to read, Lee offered me this book to review and I am pleased, well more than pleased. Meeting Thursday from the beginning is worth your time. Let me rephrase it, it is compulsory!
The Eyre Affair takes place in an alternate version of 1985 England, where the Crimean war still continues between Russia and England, and where Wales has declared independence. But there is more to the world that just the two above mentioned events. Technology has taken quite a leap forward in means of getting you kits to do somehow cloning and sequencing and bringing back extinct animals “plock plock”. The creation of this alternate world was grande but not over the top, every piece fit into the puzzle and gave a fascinating sense.
And then there is Thursday Next, Crimean war veteran turned literary detective. And take the term “literary”, literally. These detectives specialize in crimes concerning books, be it from stolen works to copyright infringement. It is on Thursday the story focuses and she is also used as the point-of-view for storytelling. After her job to look for a stolen text goes wrong, Thursday in convinced by her future self to take a job in Swindon, travelling across time and space is again not a strange occurrence! From that point on everything happens in and around Swindon. And we also get to meet up with some of the other characters, one being the uncle of Thursday, Mycroft Next. Mycroft, the professor of the family has designed some pretty cool stuff. Bookworms, who lead to some quirky dialogue phrasings but he also creates the Prose Portal, which allows travel into books! Magnificent. This is just great stuff. I wanted to get to know more of this after reading The Woman Who Died a Lot, and I got a glimpse of it. There was just a clever way of showing the traveling into the book by Hades and Thursday, but also kidnapping the characters out of the books and the following scenes. Jane Eyre’s dialogue with Hades was pretty awesome.
There are two other additions in the storyline of The Eyre Affair which I reckon (although I know it from The Woman Who Died a Lot) that we will see more often. For starters the ChronoGuard. This is a SpecOps division 12 (the literary detectives of Thursday are SpecOps-27, in total there are 34, each specializes in a different branch). Thursday’s father is part of the ChronoGruard which travel back and forth in time crimes. It was also a pretty cool start of the book itself:
“My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don’t mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase that the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultra-slow trickle”.
And luckily we see him popping into place a few times, saving the day but also showing a funny paragraph when time freezes! As a second there is the (evil/nefarious?) Goliath Cooperation, who as a weapons producer want to have the best weapons to finally end the Crimean War. In order to achieve their goals they need to travel into the books. But their motivations remain a bit illusive, and they, by all means do not shy away from using some violence. This is definitely a organization that Thursday will have to keep a close eye on for what she did with one of their agents Jack Schitt.
Then there is the plot line In the Eyre Affair, Thursday is trying to save literary disaster, because if you change the original works, every other copy will have the changes as well… And the bad guy is taking lead characters as hostage and demanding ransom. As you see the construction of the plot line of the book it just fall to notice that there is actually quite a thriller element hidden into it. Although there is humorous tone to the book these elements do not go unnoticed and the subtle integration was neatly put together.
The Eyre Affair shows a great combination of humour thriller, sci-fi, detective and fantasy, in my opinion this book really takes the fantasy fiction genre further. I know I am going to repeat myself but this book is how Thursday would have said it “mad as pants”. It combines some great elements that truly make this book comes to life in more than one dimension. Combining funny and witty dialogues but also numerous literary ideas with the bookworms and names of several of the characters make this a terrific read and should be compulsory for everyone. You won’t regret this.