The Eyre Affair 1: Style

RichardAbbott

I deliberately chose The Eyre Affair, with its comic slant, to be different from the last couple of more martial ones. Did the shift in style and intention work for you?

NeilNjae

I'm afraid it didn't. I was quite looking forward to something humorous, but this didn't do it for me. I think it was the mismatch between the utterly ludicrous setting and the intense seriousness with which the characters (and hence us) sometimes treated it. I think the tone didn't gel across that divide and I ended up just not caring about anyone or anything in the book.

Which is a shame, as it's obviously successful enough to have spawned a large series. It's clearly a problem at my end.

clash_bowley

It was a quick read, interesting enough, but the humor didn't work so well for me. I found it mildly amusing, but nothing to write home about. I actually liked it otherwise.

Apocryphal

The novel was largely what I expected. I did chortle two or three times (at the notion of door-knocking Baconites, for example) but overall I didn’t find it that funny, or the story that interesting, or the setting that creative, for me to say I enjoyed it. It seemed like the kind of thing people read to ‘pass time’, and that’s just not something I’m looking for a reading experience to accomplish.

On the plus side, I’m glad the author avoided the modern trap of mashing incongruous things together a it off as humour.

Apocryphal

Curious if Jane Eyre’s Arabian Nights influence came across to anyone via The Eyre Affair?

RichardAbbott

That would be a remarkable piece of intertextuality

clash_bowley

@Apocryphal said:
Curious if Jane Eyre’s Arabian Nights influence came across to anyone via The Eyre Affair?

Not a whit to me...