He knew he wanted to work in the movie business so he decided to forgo
college. In 1981 he got a foot on the lowest rung of the ladder, working as
a "runner" making tea and coffee on the set of The Pirates of Penzance. He
mastered other skills, eventually becoming a "focus puller," an assistant
camera operator. Along the way he worked on such films as The Mask of Zorro
and The Saint.
He had always loved the idea of being a writer, but not until the mid-1980s
did he muster the courage to try his hand at it. The early efforts weren't
promising. His first book-length manuscript was rejected "hundreds of
times," he says. Titled "Nursery Crime," it was a whodunit that opened with
the discovery of Humpty Dumpty's lifeless body at the bottom of a wall.
Fforde produced five more manuscripts before getting one of them accepted --
The Eyre Affair.
The plot of the novel centers on Thursday Next's pursuit of the archvillain
Acheron Hades, an English professor gone bad. Very bad.
In this alternative world, literature and reality bleed into each other.
Real people can jump across the barrier and end up inside the world of a
novel. Fictional characters pop up in the real world. A change to the
original manuscript of a literary classic changes all the other copies of
the work ever printed. Hades steals the original manuscript of Dickens'
Martin Chuzzlewit and knocks off a minor character when literature lovers
don't meet his extortionate demands.
Next's eccentric Uncle Mycroft has invented a Prose Portal that facilitates
these exchanges. Having abducted poor Mycroft and his device, Hades steals
the manuscript of Jane Eyre.
The possibilities of literary mischief are too appalling to contemplate.
Before it's all over, Next and Jane Eyre's beloved, Edward Rochester, are
fleeing the murderous Hades through the halls of a burning Thornfield Hall
(rereading Jane Eyre isn't essential to enjoying The Eyre Affair, but you'll
get more of the jokes if you do).
"I'm taking somebody as hallowed as Jane Eyre and using her in a way that is
not disrespectful but that is unusual," Fforde says in expounding on his
love of the highbrow-lowbrow marriage.
Fforde began writing the novel in 1993, but he found himself stalled for a
time, largely because of worries that Jane Eyre admirers might stone him for
his presumption. Jane herself doesn't actually say or do much in the novel,
although Rochester plays an important role. The plot "sort of grew, like
mold on bread," Fforde says. "In none of my books do I have a very clear
idea how they'll end when I begin."
He liked the idea of a strong female lead. It's also fun to create a
character whom you would like to know, he says. Maybe fall in love with.
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