Review: Jane Eyre Affair

I haven't read a book quite like this in a while! Despite being science fiction (which I generally don't like too much), the surreal world he creates and the way he writes makes it very believable and extremely witty.

Background: Great Britain circa 1985 - time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. Baconians are trying to convince the world that Francis Bacon really wrote Shakespeare, there are riots between the Surrealists and Impressionists, and thousands of men are named John Milton, an homage to the real Milton and a very confusing situation for the police. The country is close to being a police state. The Crimean War has dragged on for more than 130 years and Wales is self-governing. It is a place where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense.

Plot: Acheron Hades, Third Most Wanted Man in the World, steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and kills a minor character, who then disappears from every volume of the novel ever printed! But that's just a prelude . . . Jane Eyre is next on his list. Thursday Next is a literary detective who handles security of original manuscripts, piracy and other crimes related to the literary world.

Some parts of the book are just hilarious. I laughed out loud while reading the incident where bookworms expel apostrophes, hyphens and em-dashes. Other post-modern satirical twists include the footnoter phone, an ubiquitous communication device in the BookWorld. A footnote number pops up in a dialogue, the visual equivalent of a cell phone beep, and the character receives a message via footnote at the bottom of the page - which is there on the page (literally:-)
All in all, the dizzying pace made me feel like I was web surfing through a huge library with Alice in Wonderland as my guide. Whacky, intelligent, and wonderful. Read it if you can. I am sure some of you would love it....