For five years, I dragged freshman boys kicking and screaming through Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre." It was torture - part of the academy's "Nip a Love of Literature in the Bud" program. But finally, those plaintive cries have been answered: Through the miracle of literary-genetic engineering, Jasper Fforde has crossbred "Jane Eyre" with James Bond and Harry Potter.

His debut novel, "The Eyre Affair," is so clever, so loopy, so unabashedly ridiculous that students who hated Brontë's classic will be glad they read it, after all. And, needless to say, Jane's many fans will find this time-bending cloak-and-dagger romp a pure delight.

"The Eyre Affair" opens in a dystopian Great Britain in 1985 - just after "1984." (The novel is a riot of literary allusions.) England has been at war with Imperial Russia over the Crimean Peninsula for 130 years. The country is dominated by Goliath, a corporation that would make Rupert Murdoch drool with envy. And time travel is carefully policed by the authorities.

This is a world in which matters of literature receive the attention reserved in our world for professional sports and politicians' sex lives. Terrorists attack in the name of Jane Austen. Missionaries for Francis Bacon proselytize door to door. Will-Speak vending machines dot the streets so people can hear Shakespearean soliloquies. In one town, so many people have changed their name to Alfred Tennyson that they have to be identified by number.

Our intrepid heroine in this text-obsessed world is Thursday Next, a member of the Literary Detective Division of the Special Operations Network, a vast police force that pursues literary crimes such as forgery, plagiarism, manuscript theft, and the abuse of literary characters.

When Thursday first gets a call that the manuscript of Charles Dickens's "Martin Chuzzlewit" has been stolen, she's not particularly alarmed. After all, an ardent fan had swiped it just two years before. But this time the circumstances are ominously baffling: The guards noticed nothing; the security cameras show no one; the locked case that held the manuscript is still intact; and yet the treasure has vanished.

"A shiver ran up my back and I felt a curious sense of uncomfortable familiarity," Thursday writes, "the feeling you might get when a long forgotten school bully hails you as an old friend."

Soon, that old acquaintance is identified as master criminal Acheron Hades - he who must not be named - a brilliant professor of literature gone maniacally bad, a villain so powerful that he can walk through walls, change shape, and hypnotize opponents into handing over their guns. "Don't ever call me mad," he screams at one victim. "I'm just differently moraled."

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