Jasper Fforde - The Eyre Affair

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Thursday Next is a LitraTec Special Operative.  She looks after crimes related to literature.  She is a Crimea War Veteran, this war has been going on for over a century.  This is England, 1985.

Thursday gets a visit one day from an elite Special Operations person who is on the trail of a curious criminal who cannot be tracked.  There is no evidence of his existence, no photograph, nothing through which he can be identified.  He was Thursday's professor in college, hence, she is the only one who knows what he looks like.

Thursday sets off to help them but returns badly scarred when the criminal, Acheron Hades manages to do a lot of damage to her little unit.  She is determined to track him down and returns to her home town, Swindon.

Her family is highly gifted.  Her father is a rogue time traveler who pops back for mad little talks with her.  Her uncle and aunt, Mycroft and Polly are highly gifted inventors of curious machinery which enemies are in need of.  Mycroft has invented a Prose Portal that can take a user inside a literary work, or any book, in fact.

Acheron Hades uses the portal to kill off a minor character from Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens as a little reminder of what damage he can do to classical books.  His plans are foiled by Mycroft and Thursday.  Acheron Hades then sets his sights on a bigger classic, Jane Eyre.

Thursday is a very hands-on special operative, unlike her colleagues.  They are content to sit behind their desks and do the literary work and let the other police do the field work.  Not our Thursday, she MUST do everything, whether it is aiding Vampire hunters or stop a leak in time or hunting criminals on the streets.

She is a bit too hands-on and goes all over the place.  Her fingers are in all the pies which is quite tiresome. The main part of the story, the part where Jane Eyre comes in, is at the fag end of the book.

That said, the book is a lovely read about an alternate universe where any changes made in the original manuscript affects all the books under print.  It is a fantasy novel that makes ample allusions to classical books, which gladdens the heart of a die-hard reader of classical fiction like me.

Jonathan Stroud - The Bartimaeus Trilogy

Jonathan Stroud

These books are strictly for fantasy fiction fans.  Bartimaeus is a djinni with a formidable lineage.  He is ancient, 5000 years old.  Here is what wikipedia has to say about him:

The title character, Bartimaeus, is a five-thousand year old djinni, a spirit of approximately mid-level power. There are five basic levels of spirits; in order of increasing strength they are: imps, foliots, djinni, afrits and marids. Above these levels exist even more powerful entities, who are rarely summoned. Human magicians use spells to compel these spirits to perform feats of power.

Bart loves to hang out in the Other Place, where can while his time away in nothingness.  The earth is NOT his favorite place, he seems to dislike humans who can summon him through spells and incantations.  If he were to have his way, he would like to spot a mistake in the spells and gobble up the upstart who dared to disturb his peace.  It is merely because the spells are so binding that he is forced to do the bidding of his master.

At the start of the story, Bartimaeus finds himself pulled back to earth (London, to be specific) by a very correct pentagram and proper incantations by Nathaniel, a very young magicians apprentice.  He is give the difficult job of stealing the Amulet of Samarkand.  Soon we learn all about the precocious Nathaniel.  His parents gave him away to be trained as a magician ever since he was a little child.  He was taken in by Arthur Underwood as an apprentice.   Nathaniel is gifted, but his overbearing master is not in a hurry to teach him, hence he takes to educating himself, by reading books.

The place he lives in is London, but apart from the some shared geography and history, Stroud's London is a different place, peopled by magicians and commoners, djinns and spirits.  It is a tumultuous place,  ready to burst into a revolution, as the commoners are weary of the ruthless and ambitious magicians (politicians?).

Nathaniel is an unlikely hero, bumbling at times and a bit of a prig.  He is overambitious too, and Bartimaeus is an unlikely sidekick.  There is barely any love lost between them, or so it seems.  Bartimaeus is anything but a fawning or a supportive helper.  He is acerbic and loves bringing Nathaniel down a peg or two. Not exactly a Batman-Robin kind of a situation, we see.

Jonathan Stroud takes this unlikely team and gives us a trilogy that is funny, imaginative and full of all the things that we love in a fantasy, an alternate world, lots of magic and magical creatures.  The dangers that the major characters face are huge and seem real.  I don't know if the word 'funny' is enough to explain the humour in these books.  If you like British humour, Jane Austen, PG Wodehouse and all that, you will just love Stroud. In fact, if this magical world had been real, Stroud's books would have been described as a satire.  As the magicians play the role of a politician, I am not sure if it really IS a satire.

The Trilogy comes in three parts:

1. The Amulet of Samarkand :

 Here the story starts with a very young and scared Nathaniel summoning the ancient djinni Bartimaeus and sets him a task to steal the Amulet of Samarkand.  What starts as a prank to teach a fellow magician a lesson, turns into an adventure that seems clearly beyond the scope of Nathaniel.  In this book we get introduced to several characters that we will meet again during the rest of the trilogy.

2.  The Golem's Eye:                                                                            

A couple of years have passed, Nathaniel is more ambitious than before.  He is no longer the child he was.  But yet he finds himself facing troubles for which he can think of no other ally than his old acerbic friend, Bartimaeus.  Kitty, a character we meet in the passing in the first book has a larger role here.  She is the part of Resistance, the commoners' answer to the atrocities committed by the ruthless magicians.




3. Ptolemy's Gate:

The grand and the satisfying finale to the trilogy.  Kitty, Nathaniel and Bartimaeus find themselves facing a kind of danger they could not even imagine.  The solution has to come from ancient history, which is very painful for Bartimaeus.  Nathaniel must quit his supercilious ways if he is to spot the truth.





Comparisons are inevitable with Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series, but really, how can you compare?  Lord of Rings is in a class by itself.  It is an epic.  Harry Potter is, well, very popular, very different, it is more like a whole franchise.  Perhaps in scope, Jonathan Stroud's series is not as vast, but it is very sure.  There is no misstep anywhere, the humour in his books and the world weary Bartimaeus are the USP of the series.