First there was Terry Pratchett, now there’s Jasper Fforde. The Eyre Affair jumpstarted Fforde’s career in fictioneering and has created an entirely new literary genre - sci fi literary detective whodunnit. In an earlier life Fforde kept body and soul together in Hollywood and he thinks cinematically. Every character in his first novel is larger than life, every scene is 70mm.
It’s the 1980s and Swindon is the unlikely focal point of the alternate reality that is Fforde’s world. Things happen in Swindon, specifically they happen to Thursday Next - a female Indiana Jones in a technicolour time zone. Thursday is a literary detective meant for greater things and she has to battle the incredibly evil Acheron Hades. With a little help from her timebending dad who doesnt technically exist and a lot of help from Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester, Thursday puts a full stop to the arch-criminal’s wicked ways.
In Fforde’s Swindon the lines between life and fiction are blurred, smudged and so rubbed away that it’s hard to tell which is more unreal. The writing is a rollercoaster ride through George Orwell to Douglas Adams by way of Lewis Carroll. It abounds in literary allusions, word games and inside jokes so complicated that your mind has to race at breakneck speed to keep pace with what your eye reads. The plot devices and narrative structure is impossibly ludicrous throughout but charming nevertheless. Reading it requires not just a willing suspension of disbelief - you have to joyfully stamp on it and throw disbelief out of the window. The Eyre Affair is a ridiculous, completely farfetched, outrageously silly book but you’ll need to be extremely smart to read and enjoy it