Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey 1: The Road to High Saffron by Jasper Fforde

Eddie Russett is a Red.  He can see shades from the red part of the spectrum but he doesn’t know how much red he can see yet, as he hasn’t taken the ishihara exam that all residents are required to take in their 20th year.  He thinks it might be a lot.  He lives in Jade-Under-Lime, a Green dominated area, but he’s on his way to East Carmine with his father to conduct a chair census.  His father is a temporary replacement Swatchman* for the area, covering for Robin Ochre who is indisposed, but Eddie Needs Humility and the chair census has been given to him for that reason.  On his way there he meets Jane, a Grey with an attitude problem, and falls hopelessly in love.  The only problem is that he’s on a half-promise to Constance Oxblood – he has first option on her engagement, although he’s warring with Roger Maroon for her affections – and Jane hates him.  She hates everyone, fairly indiscriminately, but Eddie is the person she has lured into the yateveo that is slowly eating him alive.  It is from the inside of the plant that Eddie tells us what has happened to him over the last 4 days to bring him to this position – not seeing the Last Rabbit, making friends with a Yellow, earning the emnity of the local Council and falling for Jane’s retroussé nose – and the secrets that East Carmine is concealing.

When I picked this up from the library, I gave a little squeal of excitement (let me tell you, they frown on that sort of thing in libraries), skipped to the checkout desk and noted sadly that I also had Wolf Hall.  I knew it would have reservations on it and would take me forever to read, which meant I had to get started on it when I got home and not the shiny new Jasper Fforde book.  I love Thursday Next and the whole Jasper Fforde universe – I’ve read everything he’s written up until this point, multiple times.  I knew that he was embarking on something new with this book and I was excited.

Woah, was that ever a mistake.  I wanted to cry while I was reading this because I felt so badly let down.  Sure, it’s a breath of fresh air when compared to other post-apocalyptic dramas – how many of them are set 700 years after the apocalypse in question, after all?  Let alone structure their entire society on the range of visible colours available to each person?  Fantastic, right?  Wrong.  The world building is slightly painful, it’s tough to work out what’s going on at any time because the structure is confusing and doesn’t really make sense.  It’s not quite as bad as the world building of Working for the Devil but it’s not far off it.  By the end of the book, the structural layers have been stripped back and we learn a lot more about why the world has been set up the way it has, if not exactly why spoon manufacture has been halted for centuries.  Eddie stops being such a whiny bitch (which he is for a good percentage of the book) and develops a bit of a backbone, whilst Jane becomes a more interesting and rounded character the more she features.  This is the first in a trilogy of a books and, judging by Fforde’s acknowledgment to his publishers at the end, a bit tricky to get out on time.  This isn’t the greatest example of Fforde’s work.  But I suspect the next one will be good, now that he’s got all the awkward world building out of the way and can just play with the concepts.  The first half of this seems to be mainly scene setting, explaining that the natural colours of the world aren’t visible to everyone any more and so synthesised “univisual” colours are made from salvaged scrap colour – tosh – that was made before the Something that Happened 700 years earlier.  The plot doesn’t get going until the last third of the book, really.

If you’re not familiar with the bizarre genius that is Jasper Fforde, go read The Eyre Affair.  It’s pure genius, one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.  He manages to create a convincing world where cheese is the ultimate in luxury items, everyone owns a cloned Dodo and croquet is a high-octane sport.  Who wouldn’t love that?  The venn diagram of Shades of Grey and the Thursday Next universe has a large central section with little crescents either side of differences.  Sadly, for me, one of the bits that exists only in the Thursday Next circle is an interesting and funny central character.  Like so:

Jasper Fforde is one of the best authors around at the moment and even though I’ve panned his latest book, it’s because I’ve set it against the standard of his other work and found it to be lacking.  Compared to most of the other books available today, it easily deserves 5 or even 6 stars.

* Colours don’t just determine your standing in society, they are also medicinal.  It is the job of a Swatchman to match up an illness to the curative colour.  Certain shades of green can make you high as well, which is called Chasing the Frog.  This colour is Lincoln:

“….Lincoln or 125-66-53 was a chromatropic pain-killer ten times more powerful than Lime. Even a glimpse was enough to lower the heart rate, and a good ten-second stare would bring on a sense of dreamy other-worldliness and hallucinations. Some maintained it was a harmless indulgence, but a heavy Greener risked damaging their cortex..”

Advertisement