I found something I've never noticed before as I'm re-reading T'he Eyre Affair', at the top of chapter 22 where Millon de Floss discusses his feeling over the loss of each Felix he says

"...it had been a terrible blo ; not only the lossof a trusted friend and colleague in crime, but also the terrible realisation that the alien emotions of loss he had felt betrayed his half-human ancestry, something he abhorred."

it goes on to mention his "more demonic attributes", is this Millon using a dollop of artistic licence or is there truly something non-human in his ancestry?

Andrea



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Sylvester says.... *plock*




actually he says peep, cheep, chirrup, squalk,muttermuttergrumblegrumble, oh and now he falls off his pirch whish is followed by a sheepish peek round to see if anyone was looking and a quick scramble back up

HmmMmmmmm! I just re-read that blurb and now you've got me curious too! I think it is some foreshadowing. What else would explain the Hades family ability to do odd things. Remember, Acheron could image project and and make himself invisible to cameras. And Aornis could memory hop as well as levitate LARGE objects at will. I wonder what Styx's ability was...

Leave it to Jasper to leave a can of worms WIDE open (yet covered enough so they don't dry out! LOL)

I've been wondering about that myself, but no hints have as yet surfaced as the nature of the Hades' nonhuman side. (We might perhaps recall that besides the Count Dracula himself, several literary characters are part demon; Merlin and Cruella DeVill spring to mind).



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

maybe DeVill is only her married name...maybe she's another one of the Hades siblings, even though there's not an Underworld river named Cruella. I know of several families who had a naming scheme who abandoned it later on so one or two kids sounded like the freaks even though they had more normal names!

I'm not sure that there isn't a line somehwere that says somevody was surprisedThursday hadn't realised who Hades was, but can't find it immediately... will have a good look though...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

I just came across this little tidbit in Jasper's stuff:

"Acheron Hades

Acheron Hades. With a name like this you would have to be a thoroughly bad piece of work. Acheron is a tributary of the river Styx, across which you might be ferried on your way to the underworld. The thing I like about Acheron is that he is actually a bit crap and seems to enjoy playing at being a bad guy far more than he is at actually being one. With a name like Hades he had to be fairly demonic, although it's a puzzle to me why Thursday and Bowden never realise who he is."

Hmmm...perhaps WE haven't realized who he is either?

is that the line you were looking for, PSD? It was in the index under Acheron Hades



Post Edited (05-24-03 00:16)

That would indeed be the one - no wonder I couldn't find it in the books...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

funnily enough, I was musing on this very topic today...

who's got an entroposcope handy?

My assumption was that the surname is quite literal, and that Acheron and his siblings are the children of Persephone and Hades.

I think that somewhere in The Eyre Affair Acheron mused about his mother in a way that would fit.

Ah, I suck at Greek mythology.



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

alright, I'm re-reading TEA tonite!

I love that we can find new stuff everytime we read it! (mostly because my memory sucks so bad! LOL)

I've just checked, and as I thought, Cruella de Vil made her husband change his name to hers, as she was the last of her family. The original novel by Dodie Smith is well worth reading. It's written with a very dry sense of humour and is charming.

If Acheron was a child of Perspehone & Hades then he WOULDN'T be "half-human"... Both of those deities had purely supernatural ancestry.

He isn't the (or "an") Anti-Christ, is he?

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"This was willed where what is willed... can get rather silly."



Post Edited (05-24-03 10:49)

He's not a S.E.B, otherwise Spike would have him, no problem. Pagerunner seems the most likely explanation, and would also explain why he's pretty hard to kill - he can just pop out of another manuscript somewhere...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

does that explain the silver too?

but if Acheron were a page runner, then he wouldn't have needed the prose portal.

Ah, good point, well made and very persuasive, unless (and I'm struggling here) just as most 'real' people fail to understand how to get into fiction, most fictional people can't work out how to get into the real world? Portal could be Acheron's only hope for getting between the two - explaining the long time between appearances?

[www.ananova.com] for some more on origin of the name....



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

BUT...

he was already in the real world and therefore would have had to have made the jump from a book somehow, so therefore, he could have repeated the process reasonably easily, seeing as he is (er WAS) very intelligent.

because, by definition, to be a page runner, once must have been a character from a book.

Well, yeah, that is the sticking point, but then Thursday is also pretty bright, and had made the jump before without knowing how.

I'm playing devil's advocate here, rather than espousing a dearly held theory, btw - I've long ago given up trying to second-guess Mr Ff. It's just interesting to play with these ideas and see how far they can be taken before falling to pieces...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

I understand, but even still, there's a bit of a flaw with your postulation of Hades being a pagerunner...

when Thursday bookjumped before, even though she didn't know how to do it, she came back automatically just by being called by Aunt Polly. Surely Acheron would have had some sort of anchor to bring him back to his book, if that were the case, don't you think?

Interesting debate, though!

and remember, it's possible that JFf doesn't even know for sure himself. He does the stream of conciousness type of writing, so who knows where it will take him!