It's disappointing that the apparent time travel at the end of chapter 27 was just a ruse. Using that to end a chapter and then starting the next with a blurb about the ChronoGuard's sense of humour and such smacks of Fforde writing himself into a corner and using a brutish method to escape, passing it all off as comedy.
At the least that moment at the start of chapter 28 (as of chapter 31) marks off the decline of the book.
The action sequences that follow, wherein Thursday and Bowden face Hades and Schitt, are fine. But the dialogue surrounding them and the scene where Thursday asks a Welsh bookseller to drive her into Merthyr are downright painful. As an English writer whose work obviously relies heavily on nineteenth century fiction, Fforde's no stranger to the pun (practically every character name in the book is one), but between chapters 28 and 31 he shows that he's no stranger to the cliché, either.
From sequences such as 'it's too dangerous, I'll never do it! - but I, the young eccentric assistant, will!' to motivations like 'I'm in it just for greed, nyah!' and replies along the lines of 'how dare you double cross me!' this section of the book is a pantomime shadow of what has come before.
True, The Eyre Affair is Fforde's first novel, but the shift in quality over these three chapters suggests that the book was rushed out before being truly completed.
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