100 Books #66 - Jasper Fforde's THE EYRE AFFAIR

Time travel! Cloned animals! Nineteenth century social novels! Exclamation marks! Most of those last from me! These Thursday Next novels, in other words, are a hell of a lot of fun! And this is only the first of seven extant so far! It's as if Lavie Tidhar and Tim Powers became devout Catholics* and got married and had a whole lot of children together! I don't know which one of them gets to be the mom by the way!

More than anything, The Eyre Affair, and, from what I'm hearing, all the rest of the books in this series, is a novel for a certain kind of person: the kind who crows with delight at the idea of children trading Henry Fielding bubblegum cards and arguing over what is a fair exchange for a rare Sophia (answer: an Allworthy, a Tom Jones and an Amelia). I am that kind of person.

It is also for the kind of person who thinks The Sandbaggers (a 1970s British TV show about a very small unit of very covert Cold War operatives) was one of television's greatest achievements. I am also that kind of person.

Ditto for the kind of person who dreams about what it would be like if radical Baconians (people who think Francis Bacon was the actual author of Shakespeare's plays) and Marlovians (people who think Kit Marlowe was better than Shakers, or even that he was the real author) engaged in various forms of combat in the present day, said combat/competitiveness including door-to-door solicitations like so many Mormon teenagers on Mission. Oh  yes, I am one of those as well.

If you're reaching the conclusion that I would have liked this book even if the characterization and plotting were crap, you are right. Fortunately, those elements are of a quality almost as worthy of praise as all these schticks that Fforde has combined here. I say almost only because really, I'm pretty sure no plot, no characters, could ever be as awesome as Richard III (the play; I do feel the need to emphasize that it's the play rather than the actual king, as we are dealing with some time travel here) being heckled, Rocky Horror-style.

And I'll stop just dropping bits now, I promise. But gosh, are they fun. The temptation to share all of my favorites is really hard to resist.

At heart, the Eyre Affair is a detective novel, one that, probably, counts as a cozy mystery. Thursday Next, a veteran of the Crimean War (that is still going on in this alternate 1985), works in "LitTec", a sort of crime squad dedicated to, e.g., stamping out the trade in fake original Byron manuscripts purportedly brought through time. It's not very exciting work, and she is tired of it and longs for adventure, but when she gets sucked into a high level investigation for which she is uniquely qualified, she gets more than she bargained for. As well she should, in such a world!

Soon she's on the trail of a supervillain who can't be photographed or filmed, which means no one knows what he looks like - except our heroine, who happens to once have had him as a professor. And not appearing in photos is just one of his powers. He has a lot of powers.

So yes, this book is lots of fun, but there are some quirks, some of which feel a bit amateurish, that bugged me from time to time. Like our narrator's** tendency, when relating flashbacks to other characters, to include the kind of dialogue tags, complete with adverbs, that are natural for a first person narrator of a piece of fiction, but which real, normal people -- or characters in most quality fiction -- do not use in ordinary conversation, and especially not when reporting to superiors in an official capacity. Think about it. If your boss had called you in to ask you about something bad that happened, would  you say things like "Acheron smiled admiringly. He would have continued his brutal game for as long as he could, but the distant wail of police sirens hastened him into action. He shot me once in the chest and left me for dead" would you? No, you would say something like "we heard sirens, and then Acheron smiled, shot me, and took off." Or at least I would.

I can almost, almost, accept this as a very clever stylistic choice on Fforde's part; this is a world that takes classic literature extremely seriously, and our narrator is someone who spends a lot of time up to her eyeballs in it (literally, but I'm trying to avoid major spoilers), and so maybe, just  maybe, she would actually talk that way.

To police and higher ups in the secret service.

In a disciplinary/investigative setting.

 OK, no, I just talked myself out of that completely. It's official: I consider this a flaw, and a fairly annoying  one.

I'm inclined, though, to forgive Mr. Fforde this tic, not just because of the amusing bits the flavor of which I suggested above, but for the interesting conceit he has cooked up for these books: novels have a real and tangible existence, and each reading of one activates it as a sort of rigidly performed stage play, the characters and creatures performing their roles perfectly, identically, every single time, down to the smallest gesture. As it is written, so shall it be, over and over until nobody reads the book ever again -- except for special cases when a reader somehow penetrates the printed page, enters the story and interferes. Then, not only can that "performance" change, but so can the original text. Forever.

See? Interesting! Even when it's not combined with time travelers and cloned pet dodos and interagency politics and star-crossed love stories! But here, it is!

As the title of this novel suggests, the book getting picked on by both villain and heroine is Jane Eyre, with which the villain interferes to a disastrous degree and which our heroine must repair by foiling the villain and minutely supervising the course of the plot once the villain is foiled. Which is to say that, while I can't imagine anyone who wasn't already a fan of Jane Eyre picking up this book, heaven help that poor soul, especially if he or she is spoiler-averse.

For the rest of us, this is, as other reviewers have put it, a silly book for smart people, at least the kind of smart people who wish that art and literature were taken as seriously in this world as in the one Fforde has imagined. And yes, of course, I am one of those, too. Aren't you?

Oh, and Doctor Who fans will probably like this, too.

*And hey, Tim Powers already is one, I think.

**And well, as long as I'm taking pot-shots at the narration, Thursday is a awfully omniscient for a first person narrator. Awfully.

100 Books #11 - Lavie Tidhar's THE GREAT GAME

I would call myself a moderate steampunk fan -- I find automatons charming, I like clockwork, I certainly like well-dressed men gallavanting about in nice suits and top hats (though I don't envy the distaff their petticoats and crinolines and frippery and corsets) -- but I'm certainly not the sort who drops everything and rushes to the bookstore at the news that someone has published a new steampunk novel. It's low dose stuff for me, like brandy and cigars: pleasant once in a while but not so enjoyable if taken on a daily basis. Cough. So I cannot by any stretch of the imagination call myself an expert on the genre, but I think I've found something a bit unusual here.

The steampunk milieu of Lavie Tidhar's Bookman series (of which this is the third volume*) is one in which the author has actually taken pains to not only come up with an explanation for why the technology of steam and clockwork is so much more advanced than what was achieved during the actual reign of Queen Victoria, but has come up with a highly entertaining, even somewhat Lovecraftian explanation. For in this world, highly advanced and mysterious reptilian aliens landed on an island in the South Pacific, there to be contacted by Amerigo Vespucci and brought to Europe and thence to usurp the throne of England. Henry VII being the first Lizard King** and the succession proceeding from there in much the way of our world except, e.g. Elizabeth I was the greatest of all the rulers of the Lizardines, at least until Victoria of the powerful tail and forked tongue and...

And guys, I haven't even gotten to the weird bits yet.

For The Great Game (and presumably the two prior Bookman novels) entertains two big conceits simultaneously: 1. That the long rule of England and other bits of Europe by advanced reptilian aliens from outer space has spurred considerable technological development to the point where, for instance, Charles Babbage lives on and on as a nightmarishly freaky steampunk cyborg, and 2. That pretty much every character from 19th Century popular fiction actually existed, in many cases right alongside the authors who made them up in our world, so that not only is Bram Stoker a character but so is Lucy Westenra***. Karl May, the German author of a series of dime westerns, exists and so does his famous character, the Apache warrior Winnetou (who, of course, trained Harry Houdini in the way of the diplomat/spy. Of course). And there are more and more and more. For about the first third of the novel, it is amusing to spot all the characters from Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle and Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas (though I got a bit annoyed at the coyness with which some were presented, as if I was being challenged to recognize them, which kept knocking me out of my happy story reading trance, and we all know how much I don't like that), but after a while, one goes into overload. When Miss Havisham shows up as some kind of human library, I kind of threw my hands up in the air and sighed. But I also chuckled a bit.

Which is to say that if you're a fan of crossovers and secret histories, the Bookman series will pretty much make your brain explode. Keep your tophat on tightly so as to avoid spattering the wallpaper, would you?

Me, I'm not so much of one. I prefer authors to make up their own characters, on the whole -- but at least, if one is going to do it, Lavie Tidhar has pretty much shown exactly how to do it.

Even before Harry Houdini is made over into a [spoiler redacted] and is sent off into [spoiler redacted]. And Number Six refrains from announcing he is not a number but does indeed find his way out of The Village. What? No no, just roll with it.

You'll be glad you did.

*Once again, my Angry Robot ebook subscription brought me a late entry in a series. Regular readers of this blog know that usually results in my huffing off to the AR store to snag the earlier entries because I have that serial compulsion they count on, but just this once I decided to try jumping in at Book Three. I'm glad I did. And yes, I huffed off to the store to get the earlier books, but only after realizing I'd plowed through 2/3 of this book in a single sitting. Wa-hey!

**Nuts to you, Jim Morrison. Hee hee.

***And, as seems traditional for steampunk, the female characters play havoc with conventional gender stereotyping by being, to a woman, pistol-packing paragons of badassery (except when, as with Isabella Beeston, they remain somewhat conventionally feminine except in that they get elected Prime Minister). As someone who enjoys the classics but always gnashes her teeth at how much it always sucks to be a woman in the periods depicted, I must say I enjoy the hell out of this tradition, even though it strains my credulity rather a lot.