The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I came across The Eyre Affair online, where it was touted as a potential crossover for Jane Eyre fans. Imagine my excitement, my delight, my impatience to read this book. Then imagine my utter despondency, my disillusion, my disenchantment, when I read it and found it to be a poorly contrived fantasy with minmal Eyre-time, if you will.

The book is supposed to to be set in 1985, but it is a parallel-universe 1985 with over-the-counter cloned dodos, regular rents in the fabric of time and space on the side of the road, and a constantly shifting sense of reality with the line between fact and fiction quite blurry. Literature has an abnormal presence in this world, and some guy, apparently half-demon, has discovered a way to place fictional characters in the real world and kill them. Our main character must find a way to stop him before he murders the entire canon of classics. Blah, blah, blah.

The characters were flat, the dialogue was static and forced. The plot was choppy, the details were poorly thought out. For instance, the premise is that in this world's version of Jane Eyre, Jane never goes back to Rochester in the end. Later on, Fforde's protagonist causes the real ending to come about. I do not think Jane Eyre would have become a beloved classic without its original ending. The book is nothing without that ending. And it is a bit narcissistic to make one's character the cause of the best part of one of the best books ever.

Oh, and the typos. One "bails out;" one does not "bale out." Very, very bad. Throughout the entire book, I felt as if I could do a better job. It was an amusing concept, but the writing was so bad. I was hoping for a masterful writer who could take me back to the way I felt when I first read Charlotte Bronte's classic. But all I got was a second-rate, sub-par, disappointment.