Review - The Eyre Affair
Jan. 6th, 2009 02:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wilderthanJane Eyre is one of my favourite books; I was understandably intrigued by Jasper Fforde's idea. I was actually surprised how little of the book involves Jane Eyre -- Rochester appears several times throughout the book, but you get more than halfway through the book before you actually begin to find out why. The concept is interesting, but not very well explained. Actually, that goes for all of it: there are lots of interesting ideas, like alternate history, a guy who is on the run throughout time and space, being able to step into a book through a 'prose portal'... Perhaps my favourite thing was the fact that the 'original' Jane Eyre, according to this world, ended differently, and it was the efforts of our heroine Thursday Next that produced the novel we know today, which is -- of course -- better.
The characters themselves actually fall quite flat, too. I couldn't care less about the romance and the villain produces no sense of menace at all, for me. The writing itself isn't brilliant. It doesn't come alive for me, really. It's the ideas I love about this, and those definitely earn it quite a high rating from me. I did like some elements of the style a lot -- for example, various parts of it echo Jane Eyre: Thursday looks into a mirror and thus describes herself, the wedding at the end is disrupted because one member is already married...
It's actually hard to do a full review of this as it switches genres quite a lot. I thought it was fun, perhaps a bit lighter than I expected, worth a try to see if you can get on with it. I do have the sequels to read, but I suspect I might tire of the ideas... We'll see.
The characters themselves actually fall quite flat, too. I couldn't care less about the romance and the villain produces no sense of menace at all, for me. The writing itself isn't brilliant. It doesn't come alive for me, really. It's the ideas I love about this, and those definitely earn it quite a high rating from me. I did like some elements of the style a lot -- for example, various parts of it echo Jane Eyre: Thursday looks into a mirror and thus describes herself, the wedding at the end is disrupted because one member is already married...
It's actually hard to do a full review of this as it switches genres quite a lot. I thought it was fun, perhaps a bit lighter than I expected, worth a try to see if you can get on with it. I do have the sequels to read, but I suspect I might tire of the ideas... We'll see.
