Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair is the first book in his Thursday Next series.Thursday Next is an officer with the Special Operations Network. SpecOps was created to handle things outside of normal police duties - situations either too unusual or too specialized. It is made up of 30 departments. SO-27 is the department is the Literary Detective Division. It is the division Thursday usually works in. A typical day for her would include examining possible forgeries of Shakespeare's plays or tracking down a stolen manuscript.
But the theft of the original manuscript of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit is not an everyday theft. It was stolen by the third most dangerous criminal in all of England - Acheron Hades. Acheron is also a former professor of Thursday's. That is why she is temporarily promoted to SO-5: Search & Containment.
The manuscript must be recovered before Hades can find a way to alter the story. The original manuscript of a story is the most volatile. "All copies anywhere on the planet, in whatever form, originate from that first act of creation. When the original changes, all the others have to change too."
So why is the book called the Eyre Affair and not the Chuzzlewit Affair? Well, Acheron Hades a very notorious criminal. Do you think someone like that, if not stopped, will be satisfied with changing only one manuscript? What will happen to the novel Jane Eyre (written in the first person) if Jane is kidnapped?
Fforde, Jasper. (2001). The Eyre Affair. New York: Viking.
Fantasy / Alternate Reality. Literary Detective. Mystery.
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