![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Review: The Eyre Affair
Sep. 18th, 2009 12:20 amThis was on the reading list for the unit on Fantasy Narrative I’m taking this semester. I’m not entirely sure I’d class it as fantasy; I’d place it closer to the science fiction side of the scale. I suspect it ended up on the list largely to compliment the other books there - The Lord of the Rings, Anansi Boys, and The Princess Bride were also on the list, and all have meta-stories or self-reflective narratives of some form.
The Eyre Affair is set in an alternate timeline where classic literature is the dominant form of popular culture, and a new invention gives individuals the power to enter books, interact with characters there, and bring items and people out of them into the real world. This is a wonderfully whimsical idea, and thus I think it's something of a shame that it's the premise of such a terrible book.
The main problem is that for a book supposedly focused on literature, a book that potentially has the whole of human written culture as a setting, very little of the text actually deals with other books. The title refers to the climax of the story, where the villain is attempting to hold the character Jane Eyre to ransom, and the protagonist is forced to enter the novel in order to thwart his plan. The blurb implies this is the main focus of the novel; in fact, the story only enters Jane Eyre until more than four-fifths of the book have passed. The majority of the story, rather than focusing on literature, is instead take up by a series of largely disconnected sections dealing with time-travel, vampires, cloned dodo birds and other irrelevancies.
Adding to the disjointed feel of the novel is its inability to find a consistent tone. On the one hand, it’s a comedy, and so features a large number of elements that seem to exist purely for the sake of adding wackiness. On the other hand, there’s other elements that are treated with deadly seriousness. So we have an alternate timeline where performances of Richard III are treated like Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings and those who believe Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays go door to door like missionaries... and also the Crimean War has continued for two hundred years, with the main character still haunted by her experiences in combat and the death of her brother there. We have the Goliath Corporation, a shady mega-corporation acting above the law with immense influence over an all but powerless government… whose main representative in the novel has the name Jack Schitt. The main antagonist seems to have turned to supervilliany largely because his name happens to be 'Acheron Hades', and refers to himself as 'not evil, just differently moraled'.... and recruits henchmen by kidnapping people, destroying their minds and personalities, then replacing their faces with the preserved face of his dead mentor. It's kind of hard to appreciate the wacky elements of the setting when there are these horrible things in the background –but it’s also hard to take any of the narrative seriously when everyone involved has silly names.
On the rare occasions when the novel can draw its attention back to its ostensible focus, its portrayal of literature struck me as fairly shallow. Fforde creates a world where literature is the dominant pop culture – yet seems utterly unaware that the works he’s using were the pop culture of their day. Dickens was absurdly popular in his time, and while Shakespeare as Rocky Horror is one of the few bits of humour that genuinely works, I was left with a nagging feeling that an Elizabethan performance probably would have had a fair amount of audience contributions as well. For that matter, the entire success of The Eyre Affair relies on Bronte still being enjoyed today. Literature doesn’t exist separate from pop culture; it tends to be nothing more or less than the elements of pop culture that have endured for more than a generation or two. Fforde seems to think that literature having mainstream popularity in the modern world is self-evidently absurd – when to me, it's no sillier than a setting where, say, Jazz is still the dominant form of popular music. Odd, certainly, but not outright laughable.
For that reason, a fair number of the jokes fell flat for me. For example, one chapter describes the aftermath of a riot between surrealists and fans of traditional art. The joke I assume is supposed to be that this is a fairly dry academic dispute, but those involved are acting like soccer hooligans. The problem, of course, is that surrealism was incredibly controversial when it first emerged. Fforde quite often doesn't seem to have done the research, and just assumes that an ordinary person expressing an opinion on 'high art' is funny in itself.
As for the metafictional elements – well, they’re something of a mess too. By the time the characters go into Jane Eyre, the plot is beginning to fall apart due to the weight of vampires, temporal paradoxes, and a hundred bad jokes, and really doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. Philosophically – well, the most interesting aspect is that as a result of the protagonist’s actions while in the book, the ending of Jane Eyre is altered. The problem is that this ends up being a lot less exciting once you realise that in The Eyre Affair's world, originally Jane leaves Rochester and goes off to India to become a missionary; the ‘altered’ ending is, in fact, the one that Bronte wrote in the real world. There's not much to say about a book that on the one hand seems to endorse the idea of altering the classics, of changing their plots to suit one’s own taste, and yet on the other hand ends with a reaffirming of the status quo, with 'our' ending, the 'correct' ending completely overwriting the 'wrong' ending, the different ending.
There is one other metafictional element, now that I think of it – Chapter 13 of this book is missing; the table of contents refers you to a blank page. It’s nothing but a joke; there’s no gap in the narrative, no hint that something is missing from chapter 14 onwards. Still, I suppose it's possible the whole book's a metafictional joke - that Chapter 13 was the lynch-pin of the plot, but some villain stole it, causing the rest of the book to collapse into a barely readable mess.
The Eyre Affair is set in an alternate timeline where classic literature is the dominant form of popular culture, and a new invention gives individuals the power to enter books, interact with characters there, and bring items and people out of them into the real world. This is a wonderfully whimsical idea, and thus I think it's something of a shame that it's the premise of such a terrible book.
The main problem is that for a book supposedly focused on literature, a book that potentially has the whole of human written culture as a setting, very little of the text actually deals with other books. The title refers to the climax of the story, where the villain is attempting to hold the character Jane Eyre to ransom, and the protagonist is forced to enter the novel in order to thwart his plan. The blurb implies this is the main focus of the novel; in fact, the story only enters Jane Eyre until more than four-fifths of the book have passed. The majority of the story, rather than focusing on literature, is instead take up by a series of largely disconnected sections dealing with time-travel, vampires, cloned dodo birds and other irrelevancies.
Adding to the disjointed feel of the novel is its inability to find a consistent tone. On the one hand, it’s a comedy, and so features a large number of elements that seem to exist purely for the sake of adding wackiness. On the other hand, there’s other elements that are treated with deadly seriousness. So we have an alternate timeline where performances of Richard III are treated like Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings and those who believe Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays go door to door like missionaries... and also the Crimean War has continued for two hundred years, with the main character still haunted by her experiences in combat and the death of her brother there. We have the Goliath Corporation, a shady mega-corporation acting above the law with immense influence over an all but powerless government… whose main representative in the novel has the name Jack Schitt. The main antagonist seems to have turned to supervilliany largely because his name happens to be 'Acheron Hades', and refers to himself as 'not evil, just differently moraled'.... and recruits henchmen by kidnapping people, destroying their minds and personalities, then replacing their faces with the preserved face of his dead mentor. It's kind of hard to appreciate the wacky elements of the setting when there are these horrible things in the background –but it’s also hard to take any of the narrative seriously when everyone involved has silly names.
On the rare occasions when the novel can draw its attention back to its ostensible focus, its portrayal of literature struck me as fairly shallow. Fforde creates a world where literature is the dominant pop culture – yet seems utterly unaware that the works he’s using were the pop culture of their day. Dickens was absurdly popular in his time, and while Shakespeare as Rocky Horror is one of the few bits of humour that genuinely works, I was left with a nagging feeling that an Elizabethan performance probably would have had a fair amount of audience contributions as well. For that matter, the entire success of The Eyre Affair relies on Bronte still being enjoyed today. Literature doesn’t exist separate from pop culture; it tends to be nothing more or less than the elements of pop culture that have endured for more than a generation or two. Fforde seems to think that literature having mainstream popularity in the modern world is self-evidently absurd – when to me, it's no sillier than a setting where, say, Jazz is still the dominant form of popular music. Odd, certainly, but not outright laughable.
For that reason, a fair number of the jokes fell flat for me. For example, one chapter describes the aftermath of a riot between surrealists and fans of traditional art. The joke I assume is supposed to be that this is a fairly dry academic dispute, but those involved are acting like soccer hooligans. The problem, of course, is that surrealism was incredibly controversial when it first emerged. Fforde quite often doesn't seem to have done the research, and just assumes that an ordinary person expressing an opinion on 'high art' is funny in itself.
As for the metafictional elements – well, they’re something of a mess too. By the time the characters go into Jane Eyre, the plot is beginning to fall apart due to the weight of vampires, temporal paradoxes, and a hundred bad jokes, and really doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. Philosophically – well, the most interesting aspect is that as a result of the protagonist’s actions while in the book, the ending of Jane Eyre is altered. The problem is that this ends up being a lot less exciting once you realise that in The Eyre Affair's world, originally Jane leaves Rochester and goes off to India to become a missionary; the ‘altered’ ending is, in fact, the one that Bronte wrote in the real world. There's not much to say about a book that on the one hand seems to endorse the idea of altering the classics, of changing their plots to suit one’s own taste, and yet on the other hand ends with a reaffirming of the status quo, with 'our' ending, the 'correct' ending completely overwriting the 'wrong' ending, the different ending.
There is one other metafictional element, now that I think of it – Chapter 13 of this book is missing; the table of contents refers you to a blank page. It’s nothing but a joke; there’s no gap in the narrative, no hint that something is missing from chapter 14 onwards. Still, I suppose it's possible the whole book's a metafictional joke - that Chapter 13 was the lynch-pin of the plot, but some villain stole it, causing the rest of the book to collapse into a barely readable mess.