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| The Eyre Affair: A Novel. By Jasper Fforde. NY: Viking Press, 2001. 374 pages. | Polar. By T. R. Pearson. NY: Viking Press, 2001. 244 pages. |
Reviewed by Margaret Black
Those who write that poor damned thing called literary fiction often
try to escape their preordained oblivion by cross-dressing as mystery
story writers. It is true that many deservedly famous authors in the
past, like Dostoevsky, did, in fact, write mysteries. But that was
incidental to their material, not part of their marketing
plan. Nowadays the genre of mystery has far-flung, misty boundaries,
but when a contemporary new literary author like Jasper Fforde tries
to capture our attention with a "mystery," or eighth-time literary
novelist T.R. Pearson offers up a "mystery," I figure it's simply a
disguise to get their books off the shelf and into our hands.
Fforde's "Eyre Affair" is an exhaustingly energetic romp that takes
place in an alternative England. It's 1985. The Crimean War has been
slogging along for over 130 years, dirigibles carry folk around rather
than airplanes, some people engage in time travel, and everyone is
deliriously obsessed with literature. Young thugs take a break from
stealing hubcaps to trade bubblegum cards of Fielding's Squire
Allworthy and Tom Jones. An insanely long-running production of
Shakespeare's "Richard III" draws crowds who behave like "Rocky Horror
Picture Show" addicts. Shabby Baconians canvass neighborhoods in pairs
like Jehovah's Witnesses, trying to persuade bored housewives that
Shakespeare did not write his plays.
And the mystery here? Someone has stolen the original manuscript of
"Martin Chuzzlewit" without leaving any trace of breaking, entering,
leaving, or disrupting the secure case the manuscript rested in. It
falls to Thursday Next, our feisty heroine from Special Operations-27,
or LiteraTec, the police agency responsible for protecting literature,
to find the thief and the goods. She quickly gets on the trail of
Acheron Hades, third most wanted criminal in the world and author of
"Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit." Hades' scheme, however, proves to
be far grander than mere extortion. Moreover, the theft has also
attracted the lethal interest of the Goliath Corporation, the
mega-firm that runs everything, openly or secretly, including the
government and the supplying of weapons.
Not only do characters slip around in time, but some move in and out
of books as well. When she was a child, Thursday accidentally found
herself inside "Jane Eyre" just in time to cause Rochester's fall from
his horse and subsequent meeting with Jane Eyre. Later Thursday will
play a crucial part in establishing the denouement of that novel. It's
amusing to compare how Fforde moves fictional and real characters
between their respective worlds with Roderick Townley's method in his
marvelous new juvenile fiction story called "A Great Good Thing", a book
that I strongly recommend for adults as well.
"The Eyre Affair" reads like a cross between Allan Kurzweil's "The Grand
Complication" and Jeff Noon's "Automated Alice." It's as though Lewis
Carroll decided to grow up a little. The characters all have
delicious names-the twins Jeff and Geoff come to mind, or Inspector
Paige Turner, or Jack Schitt, Goliath's special operative. I'm
particularly partial, as someone who's been pregnant, to Commander
Braxton Hicks. But Fforde's characters aren't just names, they're
marvelous individuals, including Thursday's uncle, Mycroft, who's
invented a way to send pizza by fax and who's put a spell-checker
into #2 pencils.
Alas, the book has some gaping holes in the plot and myriad unrealized
possibilities concerning time travel. And although I could hardly
believe it, the author actually has Thursday look in a mirror in order
to give us a description of her. Fforde borrows rather freely from
others, as when he has Acheron scratching phonograph records (remember
them?) in his spare time like the Devil in the 1967 film version of
"Bedazzled." But the novel also has such humor, invention, and energy
that one forgives the author a great deal.
T.R. Pearson is a totally different sort of writer, and yet he's
attractive for precisely the same reasons. According to the publisher,
he's on the verge of wresting Faulkner's laurels off his brow. They
probably chose Faulkner because Pearson's world is a rural South
inhabited by characters who make the Snopeses look clean, upstanding,
and honorable, and his style is a unstoppable juggernaut of gossip
told in a convincing regional accent.
After winning a small, but devoted following, particularly for a
trilogy centered on a small town in North Carolina, Pearson seems to
have branched into mystery as a way to increase his audience. Mystery
story readers will try practically anything. "Polar," Pearson's second
novel involving an extremely laconic police deputy named Ray Tatum,
does have a "mystery" at its center-the disappearance of a little
girl-which is actually solved at the conclusion, if any reader cares.
No one would take up this book for thrills or suspense. On the
contrary, one page in, and you're overwhelmed by the endlessly
branching account of every blessed creature that crosses the
narrator's attention. This is Southern storytelling gone haywire. Yes,
there's a tad of puzzle-solving, since most readers will want to know
why Clayton, an unusually (even for this community) dirty, lazy, and
loquacious good ol' boy, suddenly clams up, calls himself Titus, and
begins to draw a curious design in charcoal on the wall by his
chimney. He also suddenly exhibits a gift for completely trivial
prophecy and starts suffering signs of frostbite. And yes, those
readers who can remember the little girl by the end of the book do
want to know what happened to her.
Redneck humor has rarely had a workout like this outside the Internet
or an old episode of "The Dukes of Hazzard." In the often-hilarious
volcanic spewing of the narrative, the author portrays a world where
it's hard to find anyone who earns an honest living, where duplicity
and violence vie with sex and stupidity as dominant traits of the
population. The endless farting, explosive shitting, and explicitly
described vomiting would be right at home in a Farrelly brothers
movie. But the sheer energy of the author's relentless voice, his
perfect ear for dialect, and his immensely fertile invention will stun
most readers into stumbling along after him.
Mysteries in the genre sense these two books are not, and
perhaps it's a shame that they even had to pretend. Both "The
Eyre Affair" and "Polar" may be flawed, but they are works by
talented writers which would deserve a wide readership even
without police officers at their centers.
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