August review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2014: The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde, 2001 OR Girl Reading by Katie Ward, 2011. [Alternate History category]
Although alternate history is one of my favorite things to read, I am going to be honest and say that I didn't quite know what to do for this month. Every time I thought I found something, I would over-think it and cross it off, and kept coming back to a Bobby Pendragon book I read when I was younger that dealt with the Hindenburg zeppelin crash (titled The Never War for all those interested....GOD, Pendragon was a great series...) and kept stalling. But I had two books, one was sort of on the list, another was one I bought a while back and sort of turned into something that might fit as I went along. The former was The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, and the latter was Girl Reading by Katie Ward. But once I finished both books, I stalled out again, trying to pick which one to write about. Until I had a brilliant idea to JUST NOT CHOOSE. So here we go, two book reviews for the price of one, because I am an indecisive little bibliophile. So I will go through them both real quick before getting into the crux of my conundrum.
First up, we have The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde. The Eyre Affair is set in an alternate version of Britain in the 1980s, where literature has its own division in the police force and Dodos can be genetically reanimated as pets. Enter Thursday Next, the heroine of the story who appears to have a whole series of adventures, as I discovered once I prodded a little deeper. She is your typical hardened ex-military policewoman, cynical and mysterious about her past, which conveniently turns up in the form of the government's newest arch-nemesis Acheron Hades, or Thursday's college professor. Events ensue that leave Thursday, still cynical but now physically broken as well, in the hospital, where she is visited by an apparition which appears to be herself in a flamboyant sportscar, just showing up in the middle of the hospital room with no form of introduction. Basically the first 50 pages happen very fast in order to get Thursday to go back home, ostensibly to escape the drama that just ends up finding her and trapping her aunt in a Byron poem (yes, literally in a Byron poem--that's another point; you can go into literature using Thursday's uncle Mycroft's device, which is obviously stolen for nefarious and blackmailing purposes, but I'll get to more of that later). Thursday is quickly swept up in the small-town LiteraTec force, continuing the search for Hades that intensifies when he gets himself into the original manuscript of Jane Eyre and steals Jane just as she was about to save Rochester from the fire in his bedroom. Thursday and her new partner get Jane back to the story, but Thursday ends up having to stay in the story herself to make sure Hades doesn't cause any more mischief. Before I move on, I should point out that in this universe, Jane Eyre ends with Jane conceding to the ridiculous St. John Rivers ("that slimy and pathetic excuse for a vertebrate," pouts Rochester) and going with him to Africa because THAT is a plausible turn of events. The point is that in Thursday's world, a lot of people (including Thursday) are kinda pissed about the ending. Which will come into play. ....At the end.
Girl Reading, on the other hand, is a bit of a horse of a different color. And like the horse of a different color, it changes its color a number of times during its run: Girl Reading is a novel of vignettes that have a common, self-explanatory theme that is, yes, the title of the book. It is a series of stories written by Katie Ward all centering on the female engaged in acts of literacy (that phrase is used toward the end, I think, and I just love it). There are seven chapters, seven images, seven artists, seven women and girls engaged in reading. These images that become the kernel of a story range in time and style from a Renaissance painter to one of the first photographs to a modern-day Flickr-type snapshot. Some, like "Annunciation" by Simon Martini, are actual paintings that one can Google for reference, while others are not so concrete, as they exist more in an idealistic state, as is the case of the final chapter. As these chapters move in a slow meander through history, through art form and subject and perspective, the reader herself is drawn in, imagining. I have often done this myself, looking at a painting and trying to put flesh behind the canvas, telling myself stories about a frozen figure, forever immortalized in a singular act. (Side note: as such, I was always intrigued by Harry Potter and the moving paintings, the ones who could leave their frames and tell you how they felt and what was happening...too bad I was only 8 when Rowling thought those up, and now no one will ever be able to do that originally again >,< ). Not only does this text examine the different mediums of expression for these acts of literacy, but it calls into question the different mediums themselves, moving along a sort of predetermined path laid out by the curator of this adventure, Katie Ward. Each chapter is a world unto its own, weaving an entirely standalone world around each image, the dialogue seamlessly worked into the chapter without quotes as if the entirety of the interaction is one big observation that you are on the receiving end of. This book is a lot less simplistic in terms of its summary, but I feel like it lends itself a little bit better to comparisons and digging in.
When I was trying to choose between the two books initially, I tried to think of both of them in terms of the idea of an "alternate history." I mulled over in my head how they both deal with the idea, what I liked about each of them, trying to figure out what I would write about for each one if it were to make the cut. Eyre took a story that we know and love (Jane Eyre) and changed it to begin with. But by the end of the book, the story is as we remember it, and it is partially due to the "ruinous" hand of intervention by Thursday and Hades--it was Thursday who called outside of Jane's window, the voice that spurred her to go back to Thornfield Hall to find Rochester, blind but not bereft, waiting for her. Was it meant to change all along? Surely, we have all experienced being changed by a book, but in this case, it is the reader who is doing the changing. Can "alternate history" start out different and then end up looking much like what we are used to? Are these existential questions of destiny and timelines that are far too arcane for such a humble book blog? The Eyre Affair dealt with the past in a way that was fun and light-fingered, even giving Time its own division of the police force, Thursday's father popping in and out to ask questions about history to make sure time was "coming out right," as it were. It's true that this was one of my lighter reads of the year, but I'll be damned if it didn't get me all tangled in mindful mires. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Girl Reading went into the future for the final vignette, creating a final picture that seemingly traced a thread back through all the other vignettes that made them seem more of a cohesive whole. The last chapter describes a new virtual reality program that is equipped with images and settings that turn out to be those that we have spent the last few hundred pages traversing on our own. Ward too brings up questions of art and artifice, of meaning and design in the creation of the woman-program that holds these experiences, Sibyl. Her name holds echoes of prophecy, but she holds images of retrospect, a comparison with the human experience if I ever saw one. Both texts question the fundamentals of their existence with equal candor, albeit unequal gravitas--you can't take a book too seriously when one of it's major villains is named Jack Schitt, now can you?--but I feel as if I learned something from both authors, and isn't that the point of this whole challenge?
