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What To Read, Next? Thursday Next, That Is

© Pamela St. Clair

Literature for the thrill of escapism only is unadulterated pleasure. It’s taking a bubble bath in the middle of the afternoon. Eating chocolate cake and drinking champagne for breakfast. When that entertainment is about literature itself, all the better for the reading enthusiast. Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair is part science-fiction, part mystery, part alternative literary history, and all fun.

The time, with a nod toward George Orwell, is 1985. Having survived 1984, the world is not quite how we know it. French revisionists busily rewrite history, erasing heroes such as Churchill and Nelson. Time travel is derigueur. Literature, much like football or baseball in the United States, is England’s passion. Debates over Milton or Shakespeare are as explosive as any political argument. Imagine Michael Moore and George Bush matching wits--so to speak--over tea and crumpets.

Thursday Next, spunky, smart detective with the literary department of SpecOps (Special Operations), sets out to save literature from the ruthless destruction of Acheron Hades, an ex-love interest, no less. Hades has kidnapped Thursday’s eccentric uncle Microft--or Croftie, as his wife Polly affectionately calls him. With the help of bookworms eager to chomp words (prepositions particularly excite them), Microft has invented a means by which to enter the world of a text, to, for example, wander lonely alongside William Wordsworth and appreciate daffodils’ sprightly dance. Hades schemes to invade Thornfield Hall and abduct Jane Eyre. He has already done away with a character from Martin Chuzzlewit. When a character disappears from an original manuscript, the text of all copies is altered. Hence, if you had not read Martin Chuzzlewit prior to 1985, you’re out of luck. When Jane Eyre disappears and her book’s pages go blank, the public is in an uproar.

Plot twists abound. Dickensian names attest to the sheer fun Fforde must have enjoyed creating his believable fantastical world: Millon de Floss and Boswell, for example, Pickwick, Thursday’s pet Dodo, and a bad guy named Jack Schitt. And my all-time favorite literary character paws its way into the action, grinning all the way: the Cheshire Cat. As the names suggest, not all of the characters are as fleshed out as is Thursday, but they are not meant to be. This is fun. And clever. And awfully smart. Side plots weave in and out of Thursday’s pursuit of Hades. War threatens to break out in the Crimea, as Russia and England struggle for control. And romance dogs Thursday, too.

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