The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next, #1) in Beyond Reality

Sep 06, 2008 Sandi rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, funny-stuff, 2008

I had heard good things about the Thursday Next series and had picked up a copy of the latest installment on Border's Buy One, Get One Half Off table. After I got it, I learned that you really have to read the preceding novels to understand it. The last two books I read left me really depressed, so I decided to pick up the first of the Thursday Next books, "The Eyre Affair."

This book provided me with the literary escape I needed. It made me laugh out loud with lines like "My name is Schitt. Jac ...more

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May 27, 2009 Sarah rated it liked it

Shelves: time-travel, speculative-fiction, mystery

This was fun and clever, but ultimately not my thing. The narrative itself felt chaotic.

Fforde has created a bizarre and complex alternate reality. I appreciate the effort he put into it (though someone who knows more about British history might get even more out of it). It's easy enough to conceive of an alternate reality where there are no shrimp, or where there's nothing but shrimp. Fforde goes to great lengths to make sure you know that his novel is set in a place where the differences are m ...more

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Nov 29, 2008 John rated it really liked it

My wife and I started listening to The Eyre Affair on our Thanksgiving trip and only recently finished it, but this unique novel proved quite delightful from start to finish. I'll say up front that no small portion of our enjoyment came from Elisabeth Sastre's reading. Jasper Fforde has a good narrative voice, but Sastre just plain has a good voice as the narrator of this tale. I suspect she could read the phone book with a sense of wit and charm behind the words.

I find it hard to give an adeq My wife and I started listening to The Eyre Affair on our Thanksgiving trip and only recently finished it, but this unique novel proved quite delightful from start to finish. I'll say up front that no small portion of our enjoyment came from Elisabeth Sastre's reading. Jasper Fforde has a good narrative voice, but Sastre just plain has a good voice as the narrator of this tale. I suspect she could read the phone book with a sense of wit and charm behind the words.

I find it hard to give an adequate description of The Eyre Affair. To say it presents an alternate reality doesn't seem to go far enough. Sure, it's England in 1985, in a world in which the Crimean War has dragged on for 130 years or so, but I would also have to add that this alternate history is laced with a sort of surreal magic. The villain of the novel has superhuman abilities, from speed and strength to a magical ability to compel others to act as he wishes, to change his appearance. Our protagonist, Thursday Next, works for special operations (spec-ops) as a literatech, concerned with literary matters (which, on the whole, are a much bigger deal in this reality, where literature has taken on roughly religious significance, with societies devoted to various authors, literary pilgrimages seemingly commonplace, and proselytizing groups trying to convert others to their belief that, say, Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe actually wrote Shakespeare's plays. Thursday's father is a rogue from service in a different branch of spec-ops, the Chronoguard, charged with protecting us from various sorts of disasters of time, including the deliberate sabotage of the past.

Without giving too much away, I'll say that the world Fforde draws is one in which not only is time travel possible, but people can also travel into books and characters can sometimes travel out of books, leading to an act of biblio-terrorism of sorts, in which a character is kidnapped from Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit and murdered. As the title suggests, however, Jane Eyre ultimately becomes central to the plot.

On the whole, it was a wild ride, but one upon which Lauren and I were happy to embark, and we'll probably look for the next book in the series before too long. ...more

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Oct 08, 2010 Adrienne rated it liked it

Shelves: fantasy, humor

I enjoyed this cute, literary-humor book, but I didn't love it. Note: here is where I must admit that I haven't ever read Jane Eyre, but I have seen the movie. However, as confirmed by my friend who has read Jane Eyre, only a passing knowledge of its plot is required to get many of the references. Who knows, though -- some of them could have gone over my head. However, its humor just isn't my style. I recognized that there were funny lines, but they didn't make me laugh. Oh well.

I kept waiting f ...more

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Feb 23, 2010 Sandi rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: library-express, crime-mystery-thriller-suspense, read-2010, audio, scifi-fantasy-horror-althistory

The author certainly has quite the imagination. A bit to long (and some of the jokes were driven into the ground) but pretty entertaining and the audio reader Susan Duerden was very good.

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