28th March 2007
Hello there!
Time for a new book I think, and I've found an absolute stonker! (Stonker being a Birmingham expression meaning brilliant, for those of us not from B'ham!)
Yes, ok, I need a rap over the knuckles for excessive use of exclamation marks, but I like a little bit of upbeat punctuation from time to time.
Today's book is The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.
Firstly, anyone calling themselves Ford with two ffs is asking for trouble - you should see PG Wodehouse's opinions of girls calling themselves Gwladys (seriously, it is actually the Welsh spelling of Gladys, I believe) and various other exotic girl's names around the 1920s. I throw this in as a mere comment, but Mr Ffordes surname is really none of my business. However it does vaguely move in the direction of exotic.
Ok down to business.
I first noticed these books in Waterstones a good while ago, because of the rather nifty front covers which are bright and yet mottled and 'torn' around the edges - very clever. They're made to look like they are pulp fiction from way back when, and it's all terribly too, too designer-ish. The really odd thing about this is having gone to all this trouble to make them look like they come from the 1920s, they use colours that frankly, a reputable publisher way back then could only have dreamt about. They also have a cartoonish style that tends toward the children's colouring book end of the market. But of course, the reality of all this is fiendishly clever, because frankly the content of Fforde's book is absolutely unquantifiable.
I actually bought the thing on my way out of Sainsburys - hardly one's bookseller of choice, and if there'd been anything else there that I fancied, I probably would have gone for it. And that would have been, frankly, a tragedy. The sheer pleasure I would have missed had I indeed gone for an alternative would have been postponed until I finally picked up, and read one of these books. (There are several of them; The Eyre Affair is not the first, and I'm afraid that I don't know which is, since there doesn't appear to be a list of other works by the author in the book.) If I tell you that there are reviews from such publications as the Sunday Times, Guardian, Wall Street Journal , SFX and Elle, it'll give you some idea of just how far flung an audience this thing aims to reach.
Plot Alert!!!
What is this book about? Ok, on a very basic level it's about a girl called Thursday Next who works for something called SpecOps. All of this takes place in some species of a parallel world, which is sort of the Earth that we now, yet it's one where literature has reached the status of worldwide obsession, the Crimean War is still being fought, and the jet engine doesn't seem to exist. However, people are cloning dodo's in their own kitchens. Basically the plot involves Thursday Next attempting to save Jane Eyre, who has been kidnapped out of the eponymous novel. To tell you more than that would frankly ruin it for you, but let me just run some of the character names past you - they're a delight. Our chief villan is Acheron Hades, Thursday's boss at the Swindon LiteraTecs is Victor Analogy. Her boyfriend is Landen Parke-Laine, and her dodo is Pickwick. Wales is a republic, and the cheese tax is iniquitous.
All I can say is go read this book. It's brilliant! It was totally un-put-downable, and I aim to scoop up the remaining books as soon as I can lay my fat little hands on them. Stunnningly good - it actually made me laugh out loud, and the last time that happened reading a book was probably the first time I read Wodehouse or Tom Sharp. And frankly, I think at some point, Fforde's going to be up there, a name spoken of in the same breath as those. It's that good. I just pray the rest of them are, because I need the laughs right now!!!
