Title: The Eyre Affair
Author: Jasper Fforde
About the Book: Alternate Universe, Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Meta
My rating: 10/10.
The protagonist is called Thursday Next. I usually don't judge a book by its cover, or protagonist name, but the main character here is Thursday Next. And she has a dodo bird from one of the first generations they cloned.
That actually says a lot.
The universe is very alternate in this book. Wales is a country of its own, Russia and England are still fighting the cold war and have been fighting it for the past century. Everybody reads and lives literature vicariously - there's even a device that can put people in literary texts.
It's a book so wonderfully in between genres that it somehow got published by one of the Romanian mainstream publishing houses, next to Isabel Allende's works, Milan Kundera's and so on. It has a note of realistic seriosity, many action-like twists, British silly humor and a convoluted plot.
And the world! Travelling in books is involved, as is time travelling. People have Very Serious Standing Points about whether Shakespeare authored his own texts or not and there are some sects that travel from door to door to convert people to their points of view. "Janey Eyre" ends with the protagonist going off to India to help her cousin with his missionary work and most people agree it's a bad ending to an otherwise good book. There are marvelous details in there.
The plot is filled with action - secret agents, an evil villain, old loves, new love, mystery and twists at every turn. Thursday, a Crimean War veteran and a literary detective (can you hear me gasp in geeky pleasure?) investigates the theft of the original manuscript of "Martin Chuzzlewit", which leads to her being integrated into some more secret agent-y circles of the government and to her getting into a bit of a conflict with the huge, nigh all-politically powerful Goliath Corporation. And meeting Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester.
Packed with nonsensical humor, sensical humor and much fun. A total recommendation (if it's your kind of thing).
Find it here.
I read this book and I loved it!
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