The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
pub: Coronet Books. 384 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-340-73356-X.

check out website: www.coronetbooks.com

Here's another book to tickle your funny bits. Fresh from following the exploits of Thursday Next in 'The Well Of Lost Plots' I decided to get in my own personal chronograph and revisit Jasper Fforde's first outing of his fierce and feisty heroine.

Thursday Next is leading a fairly buttoned down existence in this book until a bloody and mind-moving encounter with the nastiness that is Acheron Hades. This guy is not nice but Thursday refuse to take his plans for world domination lying down. Having received a message from her future self, she winds up joining the Literatecs in Swindon.

Yes, Swindon, centre of the known universe, it's all happening there. Worse than the fear of the return of Hades is what she must do in Swindon: make amends with her abandoned ex-lover, suffer her mother's boiled chicken and find a suitable billet for her pet dodo.

Happily, she has some help from her new colleague Bowden and the unexpected addition of Edward Rochester from the pages of 'Jane Eyre'. Once again, the plot is littered with characters who add subtle dimensions to what could be a throwaway comedy book.

Jack Schitt is the big-bad of the Goliath Corporation who seems to around every corner. Mycroft is Thursday's dotty absent-minded inventor of an Uncle who not only contrives to get himself kidnapped but leaves his wife Polly trapped in 'that daffodils poem being chatted up by the dead poet himself.

Even the dodo, Pickwick, although not heavily featured manages to worm his way into your affection. Speaking of worms, it is here we meet the bookworms, supercharged by Mycroft to create havoc in this and subsequent books. Soon, Thursday is doing battle with Hades, changing key elements of the plot in 'Jane Eyre' and generally getting up the nose of the infamous Goliath corporation big time.

I believe this book won an award when it was published and deservedly so. It contrives to mix up its genres into a big delicious pudding of detective tale, Science Fiction and romance.

I loved it and hope he writes many more books Mr Fforde may well be in cahoots with Lynne Truss ('Eats, Shoots And Leaves') to ensure we do not drop our apostrophes, overstuff our adjectives and become allergic to alliteration.

It's very fast paced, very funny and is a supreme antidote to the literary snobs who claim that only they understand 'great literature'.

This novel opens the 'door' to Thursday's adventures in 'Lost In A Good Book' and 'The Well Of Lost Plots'.

Sue Davies

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