In Jasper Fforde's hilarious romp through time and space, heroine Thursday Next -- an agent with the secretive Special Operations Network, Literary Detective Division -- is sent to investigate the theft of Dickens's original manuscript for Martin Chuzzlewit by a diabolical archvillain. What really happened to the elusive character Mr. Quaverly in Dickens's book? Or for that matter, to the drunken tinker Christopher Sly from Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew? Why do these characters appear once, only to play no further role in the stories? Is it possible that their disappearances were not the result of innocent editorial decisions by Dickens and Shakespeare but were instead due to devilish doings? Thursday's resolute pursuit of literary truth and justice takes her and an extended cast of ingenious characters on a convoluted historical caper, including a wild and crazy performance of Richard III that takes many of its theatrical cues from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Fforde's first fiction foray will delight a broad spectrum of intrepid readers, including aficionados of science fiction, history, British humor, and classic literature alike.

(Winter 2002 Selection)

Imagine this. Great Britain in 1985 is close to being a police state. The Crimean War has dragged on for more than 130 years and Wales is self-governing. The only recognizable thing about this England is her citizens' enduring love of literature. And the Third Most Wanted Criminal, Acheron Hades, is stealing characters from England's cherished literary heritage and holding them for ransom.

Bibliophiles will be enchanted, but not surprised, to learn that stealing a character from a book only changes that one book, but Hades has escalated his thievery. He has begun attacking the original manuscripts, thus changing all copies in print and enraging the reading public. That's why Special Operations Network has a Literary Division, and it is why one of its operatives, Thursday Next, is on the case.

Thursday is utterly delightful. She is vulnerable, smart, and, above all, literate. She has been trying to trace Hades ever since he stole Mr. Quaverley from the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and killed him. You will only remember Mr. Quaverley if you read Martin Chuzzlewit prior to 1985. But now Hades has set his sights on one of the plums of literature, Jane Eyre, and he must be stopped.

How Thursday achieves this and manages to preserve one of the great books of the Western canon makes for delightfully hilarious reading. You do not have to be an English major to be pulled into this story. You'll be rooting for Thursday, Jane, Mr. Rochester--and a familiar ending. --Otto Penzler

Anachronisms abound. This is alternative Britain circa 1985, and the Crimean war has been raging for 130 years, with no end in sight. Thursday has her own pet Dodo bird (they've been rescued from extinction). Wales has its own state: The People's Republic of Wales. Next's love interest is a fellow veteran of the Crimea, and her brother has been blamed in the fiasco of the Charge of the Light Brigade. A shadowy evil conglomerate called the Goliath corporation is mucking around the plot, through the machinations of their own agent, hilariously called Jack Schitt. Goliath is touting its newest killer weapon, a Plasma rifle, codenamed "Stonk". (It doesn't work). Next's father is a member of the Chronoguard, skipping around time to right wrongs, meddle with history, and pop into her life at inopportune moments. The time travel is handled rather awkwardly and sci fi freaks may cry foul, but Fforde's fictional world is so devoid of anchors that it's almost impossible to even attempt a willing suspension of disbelief. You're either going along for the ride or jumping off right away.

Head spinning yet? It's a jumbled mess, to be sure. Time, history, and literature all get leveled and seriously destabilized in what amounts to a postmodern riot where literary trivia rubs against stock pot boiler plot devices and TV show suspense. But it's all good rollicking fun; there are no attempts to strike weighty points about sliding signifiers or relativity. Fforde keeps the touch decidedly light and plays consistently for laughs. This is the world of camp, having more in common with shows like the Avengers, HitchHiker's Guide, Batman, even Austin Powers than the stodgy literary world of Austen and Charlotte Bronte. It comes as no surprise that Fforde previously worked in the film industry. Although the book's plot is probably sewn up a bit too tightly for its own good (disappointing to see such an anarchic series of imaginary riffs resolved so tidily), there's plenty of room for sequels, and I can sense a series in the making. A playful, jangling funhouse ride for the literary geek in all of us.

-Jim Esch.

In the course of her adventures, Fforde introduces a variety of eccentric characters ranging from Thursday's Uncle Mycroft who is this world's answer to Thomas Edison and "Q" to the enigmatic Goliath Corporation front man Jack Schitt. Given the size of Fforde's cast and the caricature features he provides so many of the characters with, it is to his credit that he manages to imbue almost all of his characters with a sense of humanity.

Even when details of Fforde's world don't hold up as well as his characters, the novel is still enjoyable. History, in general, seems to run along the same lines as in our own world with a few changes which don't seem to have a major effect. The Crimean War is still being fought in 1984, although mostly as a cold war. Wales is a separate country from England, and Lenin seems to have had a role in Welsh statehood, leaving Russia to the tsars. Just as they Red Queen believed four impossible things before breakfast, so, too, does Fforde ask his readers to believe in the impossible, and his revised political history is least of those impossibilities.

Acheron Hades' plans for domination rely on the most improbable recent invention of Mycroft Next, a "Prose Portal" which permits the transportation of people from the real world into the world of literature. Almost anyone who was forced to read a disliked book in school will be able to sympathize with Hades' plans for Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit.

Fforde's image of the world of literature is one of the most realized pieces of background in the novel. Characters in books are completely aware of their position within a narrative and the course the book is supposed to take. Nevertheless, when they are not the focus of the book, they are able to lead their own lives. Discussions between Thursday and Rochester (from Jane Eyre) form some of the most interesting parts of the novel.

A few sequences stand out, most notably a production of Shakespeare's "Richard III" which has been given the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" treatment. Fforde's world is a mixture of literature, lit theory and humor in ratios which work quite well. Thursday's various discussions about the true author of Shakespeare's canon (there are door-to-door Baconites instead of Jehovah's Witnesses) are interesting without coming to any real conclusion.

The Eyre Affair is a diverting read which should be taken at face value. Any attempts to dissect what Fforde is doing or provide a rationale behind it are likely to destroy much of the enjoyment of the novel. While a few of Fforde's tangents appear unnecessary, they add to the texture of the novel and may be explained in additional installments of the adventures of Thursday Next.-Steven H. Silver.

Oh, and art and literature are popular -- very popular. In fact, they share about the same cultural import that movies, professional sports and pop music -- combined -- do in our world. Hardcore fans change their names to John Milton or go around dressed like Shakespeare, and gangs of surrealists get into lethal rumbles with French impressionists.

This is the 1985 inhabited by Thursday Next, intrepid Special Operative in literary detection, veteran of a particularly bloody Crimean campaign (where she lost a brother) and the kind of tough, self-reliant heroine that fans of Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski series will recognize even if Welsh author Jasper Fforde's alternate history high jinks set their heads spinning. And since Fforde drops a sly hint that "The Eyre Affair" is intended to launch a new series, readers who take a liking to Thursday will no doubt find more where that came from.

Thursday's job is to track down stolen original manuscripts and spot forgeries, but in "The Eyre Affair" she gets recruited by another department in SpecOps, which is trying to capture the world's Third Most Wanted criminal, Acheron Hades. It turns out Thursday is one of the few people able to resist the hypnotic effect of Hades' infernally persuasive voice. Hades steals a device that allows people to enter into literary works, and he begins kidnapping characters from great novels, starting with a minor figure from "Martin Chuzzlewit" and moving on to Jane Eyre.

There's a bit of back story about Thursday's dead brother, her burgeoning pacificism and a lost love she encounters when she transfers back to her hometown, Swindon, but "The Eyre Affair" is mostly a collection of jokes, conceits and puzzles. It's smart, frisky and sheer catnip for former English majors, a cross between Douglas Adams' "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and Jonathan Lethem's "Gun, With Occasional Music," with a big chunk of "The Norton Anthology of English Literature" tossed in.

It's not just the past that's in a state of constant revision in "The Eyre Affair"; when Hades kidnaps Jane Eyre from Charlotte Brontė's original manuscript, all editions of the novel suddenly peter out about a third of the way through -- it can't go on without its first-person narrator. By the time Thursday manages to thwart Hades' evil scheme with the help of no less than Mr. Rochester himself, the novel will have a new and much more satisfying ending (the one, in fact, that it has in our world). I imagine that "The Eyre Affair" began as a riff on that seminal dream of every passionate reader, the desire to step into the universe of a favorite book, but given Fforde's prodigious powers of invention, where Thursday's further adventures will take her is anybody's guess.