I’ve been off sick the last few days, sleeping, resting, and taking my mind off my churning stomach by both reading and writing.
One result of which is that, after about 6 months of on-and-off reading, I’ve finally finished a book!
The Eyre Affair is a cleverly comic, extremely eccentric romp through time space and reality. I’m sure I missed out on a lot of gags by not being familiar with some of the literary classics on which it’s quite heavily based (Bronte and Shakespear getting lots of mentions), but I still found it amusing and entertaining.
It’s clever in the sense that the book mashes together reality and fiction. It’s set in Swindon, but it’s not quite the Swindon we know…or the United Kingdom that we know, for that matter. Names, places, events, often sound familiar, but have been taken into a slightly-alternative reality. This skipping between reality and fiction is also a topic of the book.
I’m not very good at reading, and it took so long that I’m sure I missed out on some meta-narratives, and was not able to appreciate the intricacies of the book. But it was still a very entertaining read.
Would I read it again? Or the next book in the series? Possibly, but I was troubled throughout by the fact that I wasn’t quite getting it all because of my lack of literary knowledge, so I certainly won’t go straight to the library. Recommend for the quirky, clever, and well-read reader.