Complicated bad guy

I hooked the boys the other day when I revealed that I was reading a book that had a bad guy with amazing "powers". They kept checking back in with me to hear the latest adventures, and wondering how the bad guy would be "got" in the end.

This morning I was able to tell them that the bad guy got "got" last night. It turns out his vulnerability was silver. Ordinary weapons didn't hurt him a bit, but the silver bullet did it.

This isn't really the usual sort of story line in a book I'd be likely to read. That's partly why the boys were so intrigued. Why would mum read such an interesting book?

That was until they started to ask more and more questions about the book and realised that it was about more than just catching a bad guy. The book is called "The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde and is actually very complex. Wikipedia says it is a '"genre-busting"^[5] novel spans numerous types of literature, with critics identifying aspects of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, satire, romance, and thriller.' I won't tell you the whole plot, you can check out a summary here.

And the boys are right, it isn't my usual type of book. I don't generally read fantasy or science fiction or satire. Neither do I read romance, but almost every mystery/thriller novel these days seems to have some romance in it somewhere. But I do find this author engaging. I've read some of his other books too. "The Fourth Bear" and "The Big Over Easy"

The book is set in 1985, but has an alternative history that includes wars never fought and political decisions that were never made (such as to not make jet air planes). It involves a lot of reference to classical literature such as Shakespeare, Austen and, of course, Jane Eyre. If I'd done a literature major I'd have understood a lot more of the references, but the story was good enough to carry me along regardless. Add to that a main character whose father popped in and out of her life in a time-travelling kind of way, who owned an early clone of a dodo bird, and had an uncle who invented a machine whereby you could be transported into a novel. It was a strange, but interesting mix.

The boys were shocked that the bad guy wasn't the focus of the novel, also that there was romance and three weddings (Jane's first attempt to marry Mr Rochester, being one). They had trouble understanding that I didn't know an awful lot about the bad guy, that I didn't know how he'd received his "powers".

Ah, I'm still ahead of the pack. I can still read books that they don't understand. Somehow that is very satisfying!