Any novel containing an arch nemesis named Jack Schitt
clearly doesn’t take itself too seriously. In the Eyre Affair, the first
instalment of a planned comedic science fiction series, that name provides
plenty of opportunities for dialogue along the lines of “Bullshit,
Schitt!” But author Jasper Fforde has more on his mind than cheap
wordplay: He also delivers multiple plot twists, rampant literary references
and streams of wild metafictional invention in a novel that places literature
at the center of the pop cultural universe. Until you read Fforde’s
description of intelligent millipedes crawling over text-heavy pages and
divining alternatives to every word and phrase, you only think you know what a bookworm is.
The
book is set in a 1985 London where literature is the most valued form of
entertainment: Shakespearian-themed TV game shows are all the rage, and a
fanatical, Hare Krishna-like cult preaches that Francis Bacon is the one true
Bard. (In other news, the Crimean War has been dragging on for 130 years.) The
story centers on a 35-year-old London policewoman named Thursday Next, a
sardonic, supercompetent workaholic in the Special Operations Network’s
literary detective division. Thursday is recruited to help capture Acheron
Hades, a professor turned literary thief and murderer. Acheron has stolen the
original manuscript of Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzelwit and “killed off” one of its minor
characters – who then disappears, naturally, from all subsequent copies
of the book. Thursday isn’t the only one tracking down the villain:
Schitt, an operative of the big Brother-ish Goliath Corperation, is after him
for his own reasons. Meanwhile Acheron has set his sights on the title
character of Charlotte Bronte’s greatest work.
Fforde’s
first novel is as genre-jumbling as the work of Jonathan Lethem, as whi,sical
as Douglas Adams’s Hitchiker’s Guide series and as mind-bending as the films of Terry Gilliam. Indeed, the
story feels aimed as much at the screen (Fforde is a former cinematographer) as
at the imagination, particularly during the book’s hilarious depiction of
a Rocky Horror- style audience
participation run of Richard III. (Audience:
“When is the winter of our
discontent?” Richard: “Now is the winter of our discontent…”) It all adds up to a
brainy, cheerfully twisted adventure.
- Michaelangelo
Matos
