by Jasper Fforde
read by Susan Duerden
ages: adult
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When I finished Jane Eyre a few years (well, five) back, someone told me that now I needed to read The Eyre Affair. I said okay, and stuck it on the TBR list, and then promptly forgot about it.

As I finished up my last audio book, I was looking through my old lists for a good audio book to read, and this one stood out. Why not give Jasper Fforde and Thursday Next a try?

I can safely say I’m torn about this novel. On the one hand, it was weirdly brilliant: why not create an alternative world, where in 1985 there’s time travel and interesting inventions; where planes aren’t used for commercial travel, and there’s a questionably moral corporation — Goliath — basically running England, and where the ending to Jane Eyre is that she goes off with her cousin to India. In this world, there are people called Litera Techs, SpecOps-27, who deal with crimes on literature. It’s a pretty mundane job, for the most part, especially for Crimean War veteran (the Russians and the English have been fighting this war for more than a century) Thursday Next. Then evil mastermind Archeron Hades steals the manuscript for Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit and all hell breaks loose, and it’s up to Thursday to put it right.

The other really brilliant thing in this book was the names: from Archeron (and his brother Styx) Hades, to Thursday’s partners Victor Analogy and Bowden Cable and her ex-boyfriend Landon Parke-Lane (not to mention the Goliath head honcho Jack Schitt. Yes, that is exactly how you say it.) they are all brilliant. No, I didn’t get all the British references, but I got enough to find it amusing.

But, in the end, that’s all the book had: a great premise and some funny literary illusions. It took much too long in set up, getting around to the point of the novel; why was it called the Eyre Affair, when it was such a small part of the whole novel? I enjoyed the Shakespeare debates, but felt they didn’t really serve much purpose in the overall arc of the story. In fact, I could say that for a lot of the novel: it took too much time building the world, which was only sometimes fascinating, and then it took too much time wrapping up (and setting up the next one) in the end. It was just… too long.

A note about the reading: it was quite good. I probably had more patience for this book in audio form because Duerden was such a capable reader, creating a world for me with her voice that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. (Plus it helped that she tackled both the Welsh and the French with aplomb, something which I couldn’t have done on my own.)

So, cut 150 or so (just guessing here; a few discs would have been nice), and perhaps it’d be a really great novel.