The Eyre Affair

I was recommended this book as something I might enjoy, and the premise seemed very interesting, so I picked it up gladly and with excitement.

I very quickly realized this is not what I expected, and as the book went on it became more and more obvious it's not for me.

The world building is whimsical, inconsequent and tongue in cheek. The world is basically our own, with a few twists, like for example that people are much more worked up about literature than in our world, for no apparent reason. There's several cults about the authorship of Shakespear's works, for example.

This is a work of literature wherein literature is inexplicably very important to people, and whose main premise revolves around one of the classics; it's just so self-indulgent.

The characters are walking collections of clichés. The villain, especially, is a caricature, perhaps trying to evoke one dimensional villains from old works of literature, and ending up with a hollow shell that feels more like plot device than person.

And the names. Ah, the names. I expect they are supposed to be funny, in a sensible chuckle sort of way, but they did not land with me. There's a character whose name is Jack Schitt, who, you guessed it, is an antagonist. There's a LiteraTec (ie literature police) whose name is Paige Turner. And so on.

Moreover, the book is full of tropes. I seriously have not had such frequent use for TVTropes.org ever before while reading a book. There's examples of:

- Two (!) counts of Stable time loop
- Forgotten phlebotinum (time travel, which seems to be rampant but not used to, for example, solve the question of the authorship of Shakespear's works which is seemingly plaguing the world, until the protagonist suggests it out of the blue at the end of the book)
- Homemade inventions
- Deus Ex Machina

And that's about as many as I have patience to list (mostly because they were the most annoying).

Finally, I understand that the author did not set out to write a serious book and accidentally made it comical: it's meant to be comical. It just did not amuse me at all. If the above sounds like something you could enjoy, by all means, pick the book up as a lighthearted romp full of capers and throwaway literary jokes. For me, though, this is both the first and the last book I ever read in this series.

'The year is now 2016', said Rutter. 'You've been gone thirty-one years!!'

Time travel? Cloning? A world similar to our own but with some strange differences? This could be a Philip K. Dick story but with slightly less dystopia.

The Eyre Affair was very creative in how it presented a standard story. There are many genres mixed together here. There is murder mystery, thriller and science fiction blended up and spread across a straight forward story to make it unique enough that it's fun to read.

My issue with stories like these I want more information on the events or activities that characters find common place. How did the world get the way it is? How did this technology come to be? How are other countries managing? If you can hold off on asking those questions and take the story for what it is then you will enjoy this story.

I am content with reading just the one story from the Thursday Next series. I likely wouldn't get any answers to the questions I mentioned earlier, and if the future novels continue to lean on popular and beloved stories like they did on this one then I'm probably better off with just this one.

3.5 stars.

Pros:
1. It's a quick and easy read (you need that sometimes!)
2. It's funny! I actually laughed out loud a few times.
3. It's clever. It's counterhistorical and the book is littered with interesting details of the alternate present.
3. The intertextual and metatextual play between Thursday Next's plot and the plots and themes of classic literary works was a real pleasure; I imagine anyone with even a passing interest in the classics would appreciate this.

Cons:
1. Most of the time the novel's in 1st person from Thursday's perspective. There are a few spots where suddenly, it's not. Given that a significant portion of this book is explicitly concerned with the practical limitations of 1st-person narration and what is required of the writing to overcome those limitations, I'm not thrilled with this stylistic choice.
2. I get that Landen and Thursday's relationship is supposed to mirror Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester's relationship, thus the rather sudden reunion and marriage at the end of the book, but frankly it seems so out of character for Thursday and out of place in a modern context.

I'll definitely give the next one in the series a try.