The Eyre Affair: Nothing’s More Fun than Re-writing Endings!

Context: When my little sister informed me that my brother Lincoln had drawn my name for Christmas, I have to admit I was a little worried. After all, Lincoln and I are not the most compatible siblings you’ve ever met (probably because we’re only about a year and a half apart, so we had classes together in church and school all growing up—there was bound to be some sort of rivalry). I wasn’t surprised to see the book-shaped package under the Christmas tree when I got home, the question was, what book(s)? Answer: two Jasper Fforde novels (sequels). I hadn’t ever heard of the novels, but I was intrigued by the title of the first—The Eyre Affair—not to mention the quotes on the back cover.

"Jasper Fforde's fascinating first novel reads like a Jules Verne story told by Lewis Carroll." - Susanna Yager, Daily Telegraph

"What Fforde is pulling, of course, is a variation on a classic Monty Python gambit: the incongruous juxtaposition of low comedy and high erudition. Though not wholly original -- these days, what is ? -- this scam hasn't been pulled off with such off-hand finesse and manic verve since the Pythons shut up shop. The Eyre Affair is a silly book for smart people: postmodernism played as raw, howling farce." - Charles Shaar Murray, The Independent

Naturally I was surprisingly pleased with Lincoln’s choice and more than a little bit intrigued. With back-cover quotes like those, can you blame me?

Summary: The book is remarkably hard to explain without going into a pretty extensive summary, so I’m just going to include Penguin Publisher’s marketing blurb about the novel which is about as good as you can get for a short summary:

“In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë's novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde's ingenious fantasy—enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel—unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix.”

Analysis: I absolutely loved Jasper Fforde’s carefree parody and commentary on British socio-political policy. A particular favorite premise of mine was the ridiculous Crimean War. Having just written a term paper on Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” I had polished up on my Crimean War history enough to appreciate the sheer ridiculousness of Fforde’s scenario. There’s nothing like re-writing history to provide some fun social commentary. Also, as a pretty big fan of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, I was tickled with the whole concept of jumping into a novel, kidnapping characters, and changing endings. Another bright moment was the slightly-crazy aunt getting caught in the Wordsworth Poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and getting hit on by the poet in a field of his own imagined daffodils. I also thought it was great that the British people in the novel are so obsessed with their own literature that they consider it a federal crime to try to pass off one of your own poems as Byron or Keats or to stage a bad performance of a Shakespeare play. The novel was slow at times, and I wouldn’t have understood half the references and allusions if I hadn’t just finished a British Literature class before reading it, but it made me feel really smart because I did catch most of the humor, and it was extremely clever.

Educational Context: This would be an excellent novel for teaching historical parody. I could ask my students to pick an historical event to parody themselves using Jasper Fforde as a model. I probably wouldn’t use it with anyone below the eleventh or twelfth grade level, but it would be fun in a European History or British History class. The concept of books within books could be pretty interesting to delve into with advanced students as well. Fforde uses some pretty intense sentence structure with lots of appositives and participial phrases—some good sentence examples for teaching grammar could come out of this book for sure. This could also be a good premise for a discussion about the popularity of print media. I think most of my students would agree that our world today is digital, and the book, magazine, and newspaper mediums are kind of out of style. However, in the world Fforde has created, nothing is more important that books, manuscripts, papers, etc. So much so that it’s a federal crime to burn a book. Print media in this novel and print media in today’s society fulfill very different roles.