"The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde

I apologize for only getting this posted now. I forgot about it on the 27th and PM'd Wench the next day asking for permissions to post it. I apparently missed her reply and am only posting now.

"The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde tells us the tale of SpecOps LiteraTec agent Thursday Next and her misadventures with her adversary, mastermind Acheron Hades. Hades is a criminal who can project his outward image as anything he likes, he's nearly impervious to bullets (as Next finds out) and he can exert his will through weak-minded people.

The book is set in an almost 1984ish Britain, ironically in the year 1985. The story begins with some background information. Shortly after, the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens is stolen. The theft puzzles the authorities on the scene. The surveillance tapes show no disturbances, and the glass case the manuscript was housed in only shows slight ripples on one side. Thursday Next knows who is responsible: Acheron Hades.

So begins her renewed pursuit of the number-three most wanted criminal in all of Britain. Later, a stakeout goes wrong when one of the persons involved accidentally whispers Hades' name -- alerting him to their presence with another of his superhuman powers. All the agents involved in the stakeout are killed, except for Next due to the care of a stranger. She later determines that it was none other than Edward Rochester, the eventual husband of Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Hades kidnaps Thursday's aunt and uncle, Mycroft and Polly. He also steals Mycroft's latest invention, the Prose Portal, which allows people to travel into literary works. Hades has one of his men go into Martin Chuzzlewit and kidnap an unnamed drunkard mentioned in one scene. The man then kills the character, only later to be discovered by Next. Dickens fans across England are perplexed at the disappearance of the drunkard, who was erased from the book upon his death.

When Jack Schitt and Next track Hades, his lackeys, and Mycroft and Polly to an abandoned hotel in Wales, Hades jumps into Jane Eyre. Thursday follows him. After what seems like months in the book, but is really not that long in the real world, Hades disguises himself and infiltrates Thornfield Hall to kill Jane. Rochester's mad wife, Bertha Mason, chases Hades around with a pair of scissors. Hades seems genuinely wary of this crazy Creole. He sets fire to the house in an attempt to kill Next, Rochester, and Mason. After a shootout on the roof where Rochester gets his hand shot off, Next finally accepts that her ammunition will have no affect on Hades. She realizes that the Creole's scissors were made of silver, and that was why Hades was so insistent on getting away. She remembers a silver bullet given to her by a vampire hunter earlier in the book. She loads the bullet and scores a direct hit on Hades, killing him. On the escape from the house, the servant stairway collapses. Rochester loses his eyesight but manages to get himself and Next out of the burning building.

Eventually Next's story parallels Jane Eyre in that Rochester advises her to let go of the grudge she has with Landon Park-Laine, who was her dead brother's best friend. He told a military tribunal that Next's brother was responsible for the destruction of an entire light armor brigade during the Crimean War, which Thursday served in. Next finally lets it go, realizing that Landon was not to be blamed for his testimony against her brother. She, with the help of some folks she met along her adventure, shows proof of Park-Laine's fiancée’s husband, to whom she's still wed. Next and Parke-Laine marry, providing us with that warm fuzzy feeling that everything's all right.

It was amusing that Brontë fans liked the ending that Next inadvertently created more than the ending that Charlotte Brontë herself wrote since Rochester and Eyre get married, where in the previous version they did not. The edited "Jane Eyre" ending in "The Eyre Affair" is the actual ending of the book.

What are your thoughts on Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair?

-Ze Baron