My friend Sue recommended a book called The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, and I read it. It is the first in a series of detective novels featuring a character named Thursday Next who investigates literature-related crime in a 1985 parallel to ours: enough like our culture to be familiar, but containing some fun differences, like the continued use of airships for long-distance travel. The Crimean War has also been going on continuously since 1853, and literature is the passionate center of British culture, so much so that riots break out over questions like, "Did Christopher Marlowe actually write the plays of Shakespeare?" Also, in Next's world, Jane Eyre ends with Jane heading out to do missionary work with her cousin St. John. In order to capture the bad guy, our heroine must follow him into Bronte's novel through an invention called the Prose Portal, and while she's there she manages to bring Jane and Mr. Rochester together, to the delight of book-lovers everywhere (with the exception of the highly conservative Bronte Society, but too bad for them).
Sounds fun. And it was fun--a little. The book wasn't as funny as it meant to be. I recognized attempts at humor which were sadly unfunny. I don't know that I would have bothered with the second book in the series, Lost in a Good Book, except that I had placed a hold on it at my library and it was already waiting for me at the circulation desk. Lost in a Good Book is much better than the first novel in the series. Fforde seems to have a better understanding of his world, and what it means that people can move in and out of books. I was troubled through the first book by a sense of the magical elements lacking internal consistency, and that is less true in the second novel. The jokes hit their targets more often, as well. I am especially fond of his Cheshire Cat, who has a new name following some political redistricting: "The Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat." I also like the Church of the Global Standard Deity.
The second novel is less intricately plotted: Thursday Next has four problems to deal with in Lost, and as I read I waited for them to start connecting up. But they didn't: four problems, three separate solutions (and one left unsolved to pull readers into Novel Number Three, The Well of Lost Plots, due in Spring 2004. Readers who like mystery novels that pull all their plot threads together into a satisfying conclusion will be disappointed, but putting less energy into plotting let Fforde put more into character and episode, and it makes for a much more enjoyable read.
Reading a series that so far consists of only two books made me curious about one-book series. There must be a great many mystery novels out there that claim to be "A So-and-So Mystery," but which are in fact "The So-and-So Mystery." It takes some nerve, I imagine, to not only write a novel but to write a novel with the expectation that it will be only the first of many in a highly lucrative series. So sad when it doesn't work out that way.
Posted by Su Penn at April 29, 2003 01:30 PM | TrackBack