The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next, #1) in Book Lust Reading Guild

Jan 07, 2023 Jess rated it really liked it

Shelves: owned-paperback, buddy-read, 2023

3.5
This book is chaos. It's all over the place, untidy, but absolutely impossible to turn away from. The story kept me turning the pages. I absolutely love the concept and the idea of spec ops. I found Thursday to be intriguing and I LOVED Mycroft. Everything involving Jane Eyre and Martin Chuzzlewit was great.

I found Hades to be a boring and uninspired villain (Schitt is far more compelling imo). The love interest was blah. There is also quite a bit of fat shaming.

I don't know if I will read ...more

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Feb 02, 2014 Heather rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

(Wavering between two and three stars for this one - 2.5 and I'm rounding up?)

In 1985 in the alternate England in which The Eyre Affair takes place, time travel is possible, the Crimean War has been going on for 131 years, Wales is independent, and classic English literature is a very big deal. Our heroine, Thursday Next, is a LiteraTec (Literary Detective): a special agent whose department investigates manuscript thefts and forgeries. Near the start of the book, Thursday gets called to the sce (Wavering between two and three stars for this one - 2.5 and I'm rounding up?)

In 1985 in the alternate England in which The Eyre Affair takes place, time travel is possible, the Crimean War has been going on for 131 years, Wales is independent, and classic English literature is a very big deal. Our heroine, Thursday Next, is a LiteraTec (Literary Detective): a special agent whose department investigates manuscript thefts and forgeries. Near the start of the book, Thursday gets called to the scene of a major crime: the manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit has been stolen. The suspect turns out to be one Acheron Hades, an uber-villain who was once a university professor: Thursday's called to the case because she was his student and knows what he looks like. Hades is not just a master criminal: he has some extraordinary powers, including the ability to "hear his own name—even whispered—over a thousand-yard radius, perhaps more" (26). He also doesn't show up on film or video, can stop bullets with his bare hands, and has "amazing persuasive powers over those of weak mind" (27). So what does Hades want with the manuscript? Is it money he wants, or does he have something more devious planned? In her investigations, Thursday has a near-death experience and gets entangled with a massive corporation who also would like to find Hades; her genius inventor uncle gets drawn into the story, too, because of his latest invention, the Prose Portal, which lets its user enter a piece of literature. But the Prose Portal isn't the only way into a book, as Thursday herself can attest: in this world, it seems that 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" (206).

As it turns out, what Hades is interested in is a particular kind of extortion: he kidnaps and kills a minor character from Martin Chuzzlewit and threatens to do worse. He ends up stealing the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, too, and removing Jane herself from the novel's pages, which of course means Thursday has to figure out how to get Jane back into the novel.

The tone of the book is funny, by which I mean both humorous and odd: it sometimes reads like a parody of hard-boiled detective novels, sometimes it's all puns and silly wordplay (character names include Paige Turner and Jack Schitt), and it can't seem to decide whether it's a first-person narrative limited to Thursday's experiences or not. Some of the moments of humor tied to the world-building Fforde has done are great: I love that in Thursday's world, people have pet dodos (they've been revived from extinction via DIY cloning kits), people who think Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays try to proselytize door to door like Jehovah's Witnesses, and there are audience-participation Rocky Horror Picture Show-style productions of Richard III. I love that there is a riot at a pub when a of Raphaelites and a group of neosurrealists clash, and that the scene includes this:

The demonstrators outside chanted Italian Renaissance slogans and then stones and missiles were thrown. The neosurrealists responded by charging the lines protected by large soft watches and seemed to be winning until the police moved in. (120)

Despite the humor being lots of fun, this book wasn't quite for me: it's very plot-driven, which is not my favorite thing, and the writing is sometimes clunky: twice the word "remiss" is wrongly used when it should be "amiss," and I found myself wondering how many times the word "grunted" was used to describe someone's reply in a conversation (ten, which maybe doesn't seem like that many, but I found it grating). I also had moments of annoyance at the characterization of Thursday: as Michiko Kakutani puts it in her review in The New York Times, "Thursday is part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew and part Dirty Harry," and I maybe could have done without the Bridget Jones-ish bits, like when Thursday makes negative comments about other women's weights (I don't think she comments on any guys' bodies in similar ways). ...more

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Jul 11, 2020 Heather rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: library-books, fiction

I first read The Eyre Affair in 2014 and didn't love it at the time (I felt like it was too plot-driven, too zany) but this time around it was exactly what I was in the mood for, and I'm looking forward to reading the next one in the series at some point sooner rather than later. As previously noted, this book is set in an alternate England where time travel is possible and literature is Extremely Important. Thursday Next is a special agent in the LiteraTec department, dealing with forgeries and I first read The Eyre Affair in 2014 and didn't love it at the time (I felt like it was too plot-driven, too zany) but this time around it was exactly what I was in the mood for, and I'm looking forward to reading the next one in the series at some point sooner rather than later. As previously noted, this book is set in an alternate England where time travel is possible and literature is Extremely Important. Thursday Next is a special agent in the LiteraTec department, dealing with forgeries and manuscript thefts, and the theft of a manuscript that's a very big deal is what sets the plot of the book in motion: Martin Chuzzlewit has been stolen. Thursday finds herself in pursuit of the suspect, Acheron Hades (a supervillain who faked his own death in years prior); her genius uncle Mycroft and his newest invention, the Prose Portal (which lets a person enter a work of literature) end up being part of the story as well. Hades's idea is to use the Prose Portal for purposes of extortion: if he or his henchmen enter an original manuscript and harm one of the characters, all the copies of the book in the world will change as the original manuscript is altered. And he's not just interested in Martin Chuzzlewit: his next heist is to steal the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, at which point things get really personal for Thursday, who has her own connections with that book and its characters.

I think part of why I enjoyed this book more this time around (aside from being pretty happy to read for plot and humor, at the moment) is that I watched the National Theatre production of Jane Eyre online in April, so the characters and world of that novel were fresh in my mind in a way that they definitely weren't when I first read The Eyre Affair. Because of that, I think I was better able to enjoy the way that the events of this book shape the plot of Jane Eyre in Thursday's world. And all the details I loved from my first read still made me grin: pet dodos created via cloning kits, kids trading bubblegum cards with Henry Fielding characters on them instead of baseball players, Baconians proselytizing door to door, a production of Richard III that's acted entirely by audience members and features audience participation in the style of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and more. ...more

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Apr 24, 2017 Vanellope rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: magic, time-travel, e-books, pub-this-century, kindle, mystery-thriller, sci-fi, bookbub-freebooksy-gr-deals-etc, books-on-books, fun-fun-fun

It's not that it was bad, not even that I didn't like it. I guess I just wasn't in the mood for it?

It had tons of awesome, really original and fun ideas. But it kind of got to the point where it just felt like a bunch of really cool random ideas stringed together in a sort-of-cohesive story, but it didn't make a lot of sense. There was just too much random stuff that seemed extra and distracting and kind of confusing. It was like the author was trying to showcase all this Original Ideas that wo ...more

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Jul 27, 2011 Emma rated it really liked it · review of another edition

As a first installment this book is excellent. Fforde has created his own little universe where physics and quantum-mechanics don't work the way we think they work. The humour is sharpe and witty and the idea of being able to change books forever by changing the original manuscript is genius. Thursday Next is a great heroine, brave but vulnerable, she's intelligent and knows how to use her brains but still feels defeated about how to control her personal life. A classic female copper in a not so ...more

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Apr 24, 2017 tiph rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: dnf, 2017

I honestly did not 100% finish this book before my library loan ended and it was whisked away into the ether, but I don't really feel inclined to try to finish it.

It was a clever book, but I also found it a bit tedious, and found myself reading just to read it and not with any kind of drive or interest in the story.

One of my favorite books of all time is Fforde's Shades of Grey, so I was a bit disappointed in myself for not enjoying this one as much. ...more

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Nov 10, 2007 Trish rated it really liked it

I think this is a fantastically neat AU book, and who hasn't wanted to be able to take a tour of their favorite fictional world? Or, maybe, I'm just a freak. ...more

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