Review: The Eyre Affair

Thursday Next is a government operative in a highly specialized version of British law enforcement. She works in a familiar present day England, but as events unfold - perhaps this England is not so familiar after all. It's 1985, and the Crimean War is still underway. Wales is a communist nation. Names we recognize as part of the USA still seem to be British colonies. Winston Churchill is unknown - he died in a childhood accident. Persons who enjoy identifying with well known Englishmen of earlier days can take the well known name for their own - leading to a series of subscripts as identifiers. A convention of John Milton devotees has a registration list in which every attendee is named John Milton. John Milton subscript 1, John Milton subscript 2, and so on into the hundreds. The reader soon recognizes that slight pressure around the ankle arising from having one's leg pulled, and settles in for some fun.

Thursday's beat is the investigation of literary forgery and thefts of valuable manuscripts. In her work she realizes that certain characters from Dickens' works have appeared in present day life, and are not always finding modern life to be safe and secure. With the help of an eccentric uncle, and of her time-traveling father, Thursday persues her villianous opponent straight into the pages of "Jane Eyre" and waits there with the help of Mr Rochester. How she uses the familiar tensions of that classic to win her struggle provides one of the most unusual climaxes I have ever read in suspense fiction.

Along the way we have Shakespeare's Richard III performed in the style of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," intriguing "what if" scenarios testing Einstein's theory of relativity, pet dodo birds (the products of cloning techniques), carbon paper which can translate into a dozen foreign languages, a literary critic named Millon De Floss, and on and on!

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Woodstock - RAM

Book Review: The Eyre Affair