Jane in wonderland

In his autobiography, "Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit," he writes, "The best reason for committing loathsome and detestable acts is purely for their own sake. Monetary gain is all very well, but it dilutes that taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice."

Because she was once a student of Hades' who successfully rebuffed his sexual advances, Thursday is put in charge of the investigation and given a license to kill.

But she quickly discovers that the archfiend isn't her only opponent. An official from Goliath Corp. whose name can't appear in a family newspaper has his own motives for capturing Hades, and he's almost as vicious.

After a disastrous stakeout, in which only Thursday survives, she's relieved of her brief promotion and returns to her hometown to recuperate. But peace is hard to find in this family. Her time-traveling father is having an affair with a woman who's been dead for 150 years, her mother won't stop nagging for grandchildren, and her aunt is trapped in the Wordsworth poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." (The inventions in her uncle's basement pose a significant challenge for J.K. Rowling's next volume. He's got bookworms and thesaurean maggots!)

Thursday hopes to rekindle a long-dormant romance with an old sweetheart, but when Hades and his gruesome henchmen strike again, duty calls. This time, he's shocked the nation by murdering Mr. Quaverley, once a small character in "Martin Chuzzlewit."

And now he's captured Jane Eyre herself. "Comrades," he announces, "we stand on the very brink of an act of artistic barbarism so monstrous that I am almost ashamed of it myself." The boundary between fiction and reality has grown dangerously porous. Citizens panic. The president of the Brontë Federation meets with the prime minister. Delegates at the UN assemble in anxious council. Only Thursday can avert disaster by entering Charlotte Brontë's classic and enlisting the help of her old friend Rochester.

There are moments of triteness when Fforde reaches for social commentary on the evils of war or for psychological depth on the nature of grief. But mostly it's just rip-roaring fun, the kind of cerebral silliness that Brits can do so well while American comedians are doing bug-eyed double takes and kicking each other in the groin.

By the end, Thursday does more than save "Jane Eyre" from Acheron Hades, she saves it from itself, correcting a weakness that's bedeviled readers and critics for 150 years. This is about as much fun as you can have in the classics section without being thrown out of the library. To those students who swore they wouldn't reread "Jane Eyre" 'til Hades freezes over, I have good news: He's out cold. Start reading.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments tocharlesr@csmonitor.com.

Page: 1 | 2