The Eyre Affair 2: Humour

RichardAbbott

A number of authors have chosen humour as a science-fiction vehicle, eg Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett amongst others. Jasper Fforde rests his humour partly on situation and heavily on name puns. The author of the very first chapter heading, Millon de Floss, is a pretty obvious play on a George Eliot novel, and things carry on in much the same vein throughout. (It reminds me a little bit of a cafe near here, The Flock Inn, where every other word strains hard to be a pun on sheep and sheep farming in some way). Did this work for you or turn you off? Was too much of the humour UK-specific or did it work across the Atlantic?

Apocryphal

Generally I do appreciate a good pun, but I don’t think it was enough to carry this book into pleasure last for me. Certainly, this is partly due to my choice of reading it in Audio format, where playful spellings do not come across. But things like Thursday Next as the main character name did come across, and, well, ho-hum…. It’s not that exciting as wordplay.
Was there any significance to it apart from being a silly name?

RichardAbbott

@Apocryphal said:
Generally I do appreciate a good pun, but I don’t think it was enough to carry this book into pleasure last for me. Certainly, this is partly due to my choice of reading it in Audio format, where playful spellings do not come across. But things like Thursday Next as the main character name did, and, well, ho-him?
Was there any significance to it apart from being a silly name?

I assumed that it was a combination of two things:
1) in English idiom, "Thursday next" is equivalent to "next Thursday", the idiom only (so far as I know) being used for days of the week or months of the year. So one might say "January next" but not "weekend next".
2) an old days-of-the-week rhyme has "Thursday's child has far to go" which over the years has been interpreted both positively (equivalent to "she'll go a long way") and negatively (equivalent to "she's got a lot to overcome before she gets anywhere").

Most of the puns were, I suspect, ones that don't come across when you hear them.

Apocryphal

I clarified my comment. I meant to say I understood the significance of Thursday Next, I just wasn’t that excited by it as wordplay.

clash_bowley

Lord knows I love puns, but for some reason I don't care for them in books - a little too planned. A good pun should be off the cuff. I don't care for Pratchett at all for example, and it took three tries to read Hitchhiker.