"The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde

 Literary detective Thursday Next battles Jack Schitt of the Goliath Corporation and master villain Acheron Hades when first a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit is kidnapped and then disruption is planned to Jane Eyre in a whimsical comedy thriller involving time travel and forays into fiction. 

It was mostly moderately funny and moderately exciting, uneasily straddling the gap between the two genres, with a meandering plot. The highlights were some clever names, including that of the heroine, her colleague Paige Turner and villain Jack Schitt. There were also two very funny set pieces: 

• A performance of Richard III in which the audience repeatedly heckle in a call-and-response manner, such as: "When is the winter of our discontent? Now is the winter of our discontent?"
• Bookworms who emit apostrophes, unnecessary capitalisations and, when really excited, hyphens, leading to mutations in the dialogue of the other characters such as: "You're Upsetting the Wor'ms! They'rer starting the hy-phen-ate!"

An enjoyable romp blurring the boundaries between fiction and fiction; this witty novel reminded me of At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (a work of genius) and The Last Simple by Ray Sullivan (which is much funnier).

Selected quotes:

• "The Goliath Corporation was to altruism what Genghis Khan was to soft furnishings."  (Ch 7)
• "It had been of considerable anguish to her [my mother] that I waqsn't spending more time with swollen ankles, haemorrhoids and a bad back, popping out grandchildren." (Ch 9)
• "As much charm as an open grave." (Ch 12)
• "Don't ever call me mad ... I'm not mad, I'm just ... differently moralled." (Ch 15)
• "the sullen smell of death." (Ch 17)
• "Somehow 'fucked up' made it seem more believable; we all make mistakes ... It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice." (Ch 18)
• "Small pockets of fog ... parcels of gloom." (Ch 19)
• "The standard joke about Swindon's morgue was that the corpses were the ones with all the charisma." (Ch 20)

April 2026; 373 pages
First published in 2001 by Hodder and Stoughton

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God