The Eyre Affair 5: SpecOps and ChronoGuard

RichardAbbott

It kind of makes sense in a world where literature is so important - to the point of obsession where the authorship of Shakespeare plays is an everyday conversation - that there would be enforcement agencies dealing with various kinds of literary crime. Did the time travelling aspect of this (eg Thursday's father) interest you or were the literary aspects more appealing? Do you think Jasper Fforde intended the occasional suggestions that Thursday's father was involved in large-scale temporal changes (eg the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar get a mention) to be taken seriously or are they just a comic background touch?

NeilNjae

This question (and the previous one) made me reflect on the reason I didn't like this book. It had an elevated importance to literature. And it had alternate history. And it had political satire. And it had mad science. And it had time travel. And it had werewolves. And it had superviilains. And... It was too much to be coherent, especially when you try to tell a story in the style of a grubby small-scale British police procedural.

But that's me.

Apocryphal

Yeah, I think the time travelling dad and various other elements of the book were more distracting than anything. But since this is likely designed as a series, and I don’t think solving mysteries inside Dickens and Jane Austen novels is enough of a thing to sustain it, that things like time travelling dads are necessary to keep the franchise running in the long term.

RichardAbbott

@NeilNjae said:
This question (and the previous one) made me reflect on the reason I didn't like this book. It had an elevated importance to literature. And it had alternate history. And it had political satire. And it had mad science. And it had time travel. And it had werewolves. And it had superviilains. And... It was too much to be coherent, especially when you try to tell a story in the style of a grubby small-scale British police procedural.

But that's me.

That's an interesting point, especially given that this was Fforde's debut novel. Did he simply try to put too much into it?

clash_bowley

I quite enjoyed the crazy world of Jasper Fforde to be honest! It was fun and over the top strange. That worked quite well for me.