The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (2001)

This is the first of the Thursday Next novels, and I should have read this first.
Thanks to my blog I could find that I had read Thursday Next in First Among Sequels, but my notes indicate the confusion caused by the pretty complex alternate world, which was more or less explained here. I know I was intrigued, because this series of mystery/thriller/science-fiction/fantasy is based on literature.

Thursday Next is a bright and resourceful woman working as a Special Operative in literary detection in an alternate England of 1985. Her father is a time traveler, who is wanted by some government agency, so he just pops in and out of Thursday's life for a few minutes. In this first tale, Thursday is called in to work with a higher level of Special Ops to deal with a dangerous criminal Acheron Hades, who has stolen a literary text. This is of critical importance, because if original texts are damaged, they damage all versions of the literary piece, and rewrite literature, which is of major concern in this alternate world. Big enough to create a whole government agency to police this - the Literary Division.

Fforde allows his characters to interact with literary characters, and Thrusday is one of the few people who can travel between the "real" world and literary ones. She had met Rochester of Jane Eyre as a child, and he seems to travel to her world to save her life at one point. Acheron Hades gets his hands on the original manuscript of Jane Eyre and starts changing the story. Thursday ends up going into the world and saving the story, but in the process changing the ending, which had bothered a lot of people. I had read Jane Eyre a long time ago, but it never impressed me, so I had forgotten the story, though references to Rochester and Jane appear every once in a while, so I was very happy that at one point Thursday retold the story for those of us who had forgotten it or never read it. 

There is so much to this book from the literary references (and I am not expert, so didn't get many, probably missed more) to entertaining concepts and names like the nasty Goliath Corporation and their man Jack Shit. It is one thing to read this name, but to listen to it on the audio tape over and over again, I actually found myself coming out with non-professional language at work one day.

We get much of Thursday's history, which is probably critical in understanding her in later books - her tour of duty in the Crimean War (an interesting alternate history), her brothers, her brilliant uncle, her former love. My only minor complaint was that too many things seemed to get resolved at the end of the book, but that is not enough for me to stop reading this series. Definitely want to try more.