Perspectives

I have just finished reading The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, one of the books I got for my birthday (I asked for "books you think I will like to read" and that worked out very well, so I will probably stick to that for the rest of my life). The book was great fun: a literary adventure, time travel, hopping from one dimension to another, and filled with quotes and references to literary works, many of which I got, but many of which also must have gone straight over my head. I normally don't like crime or detective novels, but this one was exactly right.
The only thing that wasn't exactly right was the perspective.
The novel is written in the first person narrator, with detective Thursday Next (yes, weird name, but not the weirdest by a long shot) telling us what is happening 'real time'. Now I generally don't like first-person narrators, and even less so when the author is pretending that what I am reading is actually happening right now, and the narrator is telling me the story as it is happening. Thankfully, Fforde used the past tense, "I shot him in the back", rather than the present, "I shoot him in the back", which is even more frustrating (and stretching my suspension of disbelief to breaking point). But then, some chapters are still written 'through' Thursday, but she is telling me stuff that happened somewhere else, information that she got later, from her aunt and uncle, and is now putting back into the story at the time it happened chronologically. This would not have been a problem if it was somewhere stated that she got this information later, but it isn't. And then such a chapter is followed by a chapter in which Thursday does not know what is happening in another location while she told me what was happening in that location in the previous chapter, and I get annoyed.
It feels as if the author couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted to write in the first or omniscient narrator and tried to go easy and do both. You can't do both, unless you consistently do both, and he doesn't. (Also, I think you should be able to write a detective novel from the point of view of the detective (or his sidekick, as in Sherlock Holmes) entirely, and not need extra information about what really happened so the reader knows before the detective knows).
The first person narrator happens to be a very very limiting perspective to write in. I can think of only two recent novels in which it works properly: the Tomorrow-series by John Marsden and Bridget Jones's Diary. Both of these are written accounts of something that happened earlier, which is the only way it works, I think. And even then, in Bridget Jones there are some instances in which it would not have worked for her to have her diary balanced on her lap, writing away, while Mark Darcy is annoyed with her for looking at him while he is sleeping. But still, the first person narrator works, and Helen Fielding actually makes use of the limiting perspective that it creates by having Bridget make all kinds of daft assumptions about others, which then turn out to be complete nonsense. (I'm currently reading The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan, and I have the feeling that the first person narrator is working there too, but it is the story of a man recalling events that happened when he was 15 years old, again, describing the past.)
But if you're telling a story that is to all intends and purposes happening right now, don't have one of the characters spell it out for you. And if you do, and it works, don't cheat by adding scenes that this one character knows nothing about and cannot know anything about at that moment. It's distracting and confusing for the reader, and really, you should be able to pick a point and stick to it.