The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [0]
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten
First Among Sequels
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Eyre Affair
A Viking Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2001 by Jasper Fforde
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-1011-5851-7
A VIKING BOOK®
Viking Books first published by The Viking Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
VIKING and the “Viking Ship” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: July, 2004
For my father
John Standish Fforde
1920–2000
Who never knew I was to be published but
would have been most proud nonetheless
—and not a little surprised.
Contents
1. A Woman Named Thursday Next
2. Gad’s Hill
3. Back at My Desk
4. Acheron Hades
5. Search for the Guilty, Punish the Innocent
6. Jane Eyre: A Short Excursion into the Novel
7. The Goliath Corporation
8. Airship to Swindon
9. The Next Family
10. The Finis Hotel, Swindon
11. Polly Flashes Upon the Inward Eye
12. SpecOps-27: The Literary Detectives
14. Lunch with Bowden
15. Hello & Goodbye, Mr. Quaverley
16. Sturmey Archer & Felix7
17. SpecOps-17: Suckers & Biters
18. Landen Again
19. The Very Irrev. Joffy Next
20. Dr. Runcible Spoon
21. Hades & Goliath
22. The Waiting Game
23. The Drop
24. Martin Chuzzlewit Is Reprieved
25. Time Enough for Contemplation
26. The Earthcrossers
27. Hades Finds Another Manuscript
28. Haworth House
30. A Groundswell of Popular Feeling
31. The People’s Republic of Wales
32. Thornfield Hall
33. The Book Is Written
34. Nearly the End of Their Book
35. Nearly the End of Our Book
36. Married
1.
A Woman Named Thursday Next
. . . The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going onto Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. It is rumored that SO-1 was the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone’s guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and slightly unbalanced. “If you want to be a SpecOp,” the saying goes, “act kinda weird . . .”
MILLON DE FLOSS
—A Short History of the Special Operations Network
MY FATHER had a face that could stop a clock. I don’t mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle. Dad had been a colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn’t know he had gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house one morning clutching a Seize & Eradication order open-dated at both ends and demanding to know where and when he was. Dad had remained at liberty ever since; we learned from his subsequent visits that he regarded the whole service as “morally and historically corrupt” and was fighting a one-man war against the bureaucrats within the Office for Special Temporal Stability. I didn’t know what he meant by that and still don’t; I just hoped he knew what