Jasper Fforde's Eyre Series

I finally remembered to bring in a book to tell you about. It's actually now a series, small, but very good. The first book is "The Eyre Affair." For those of us who like literature and love a bit of sci-fi or weirdness on the side, this is a series tailor-made. Think Terry Pratchett but with a distinctly literatary twist.

Tuesday Next is a Literary Detective working for Special Operations (Spec Ops) in Britian. In the first book, she is involved in a case where the original manuscript of "Jane Eyre" is missing. As is turns out, someone is trying to steal original manuscripts to change them and, therefore, change all subsequent versions. She must use the talents of other agents in other Spec Ops departments (the ChronoGuard and the department dealing with vampires to name a couple) and slip into the book itself, to put all to rights. Along the way, Tuesday finds that you can't judge a book, or literature, by its cover.

This series is brilliant in both style and content. I know I won't do justice to this series by trying to explain it so I thought I'd put an excerpt here to give you a taste. I read this section of book 3, "The Well of Lost Plots," and laughed so hard I had to read it again. Jursifiction is a legal body inside fiction that regulates what characters can take vacations, deals with villians that escape their books and inflict other villianous deads upon other books and characters, and, all in all, makes sure that books stay the way we know them to be. In this excerpt, Tuesday Next is inside Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" where Jursifiction is meeting to discuss literary issues.

'Good. Item seven. The had had and that that problem. Lady Cavendish, weren't you working on this?'

Lady Cavendish stood up and gathered her thoughts.

'Indeed. The use of had had and that that has to be strictly controlled; they can interrupt the ImaginoTransference quite dramatically, causing readers to go back over the sentence in confusion, something we try to avoid.'

'Go on.'

'It's mostly an unlicensed usage problem. At the last count David Copperfield alone had had had had only thrice. Increased had had usage had had to be overlooked but not if the number exceeds that that that usage.'

'Hmm,' said the Bellman. 'I thought had had had had TGC's approval for use in Dickens? What's the problem?'

'Take the first had had and that that in the book by way of example,' explained Lady Cavendish. 'You would have thought that that first had had had had good occassion to be seen as had, had you not? Had had had approval but had had had not; equally it is true to say that that that that had had approval but that that other that that had not.'

'So the problem with that other that that was that --?

'That that other -other that that had had approval.'

'Okay,' said the Bellman, whose head was in danger of falling apart like a chocolate orange, 'let me get this straight: David Copperfield, unlike Pilgrim's Progress, which had had had, had had had had. Had had had had TGC's approval?'

There was a very long pause.

'Right,' said the Bellman with a sigh. 'That's it for the moment. I'll be giving out assignments in ten minutes. Session's over -- and let's be careful out there.' (p 256-7)

Happy reading!