Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey (2010)

by Jasper Fforde


Jasper Fforde is nothing if not original. He writes in a way that makes the most ridiculous things seem perfectly normal. The Big Over Easy, for example, is a detective story written in a noir style, featuring hard-nosed officer Jack Spratt as he investigates the murder of Humpty Dumpty. This is not a children's book; it's a fast-moving, absorbing murder mystery that just happens to include (for no apparent reason) a cast of nursery rhyme characters. Beginning with The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde's Tuesday Next series follows the misadventures of Agent Tuesday Next, who investigates literary crimes. You know, crimes that happen in books. She goes into literature, interacts with the characters in said books and solves crimes for them. She also has a pet dodo, as you do.
Shades of Grey is another brilliantly written, inventive and original novel, worlds apart from that other book with the similar name.



Shades of Grey is set several hundred years in the future in a post-apocalyptic England, where humans have lost most of their ability to perceive colour and your place in the social hierarchy is determined by which colours you're able to see. Most people can only see one colour (maybe two if you're lucky, none at all if you're a miserably unlucky Grey) with different colours carrying different levels of esteem. Narrator Eddie Russet is a middle-class Red, who aims to move up the social ladder a bit by marrying higher-class Constance Oxblood. Sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a "chair census", Eddie meets temperamental, hot-headed and occasionally violent Jane, one of the lowest-of-the-low Greys. As Eddie becomes somewhat infatuated with Jane, he runs afoul of the local authorities and begins to question the rules and laws at the very heart of his society.

Parts of Shades of Grey are deeply creepy. It's a very Orwellian perspective on the future, with a totalitarian government ruling the people with an iron fist, pedantic rules and strict laws enforced with threats of violence and some lives (those of the Greys, in particular) worth very little. Those who don't follow the rules tend to disappear and while their fates aren't exactly known, it's pretty clear that things haven't ended well for them. It's not all dark though - Jasper Fforde's distinctive humour keeps things from getting too dark and adds a quirky, decidedly British flavour to things. There are tea shops on every corner, there's a severe jam shortage and cutlery is no longer being produced, so teaspoons are prized possessions. As Eddie says, despite the evils of the world around him, "there is no problem on Earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea".
Every know and then random remnants are found from the present world and wildly misinterpreted - for example, the only remaining "map" is a copy of the boardgame Risk, leading to a slightly warped idea of what the world might have been like in the time before "The Something That Happened". There are government-ordered "Leapbacks" every few years, in which various previously-approved technologies are banned (like telephones, or cutlery, or indoor lighting) much to the confusion and frustration of the general population.

Well, it's not wrong, exactly...

Jasper Fforde walks a fine line between comedy and dark futuristic fantasy with plenty of political satire thrown in for good measure. He is incredibly good at what he does and Shades of Grey is a fantastic read - compelling, dramatic and exciting, but also genuinely funny. There's some serious subject matter in there that will really make you think, but Fforde's light-hearted tone prevents it from all becoming too much. Right from the first paragraph, the wry humour sets the tone: "It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant. It wasn't really what I'd planned for myself - I'd hoped to marry into the Oxbloods and join their dynastic string empire. But that was four days ago, before I met Jane, retrieved the Caravaggio and explored High Saffron. So instead of enjoying aspirations of Chromatic advancement, I was wholly immersed within the digestive soup of a yateveo tree. It was all frightfully inconvenient."

A yateveo tree. Doesn't look like a particularly pleasant way to go.

Like any good Jasper Fforde book, Shades of Grey is strange, compelling and delightful. It's packed full of clever little details, making this completely oddball idea of a chromatically-based apartheid seem perfectly believable on not just a little bit horrifying. The only part that's a little frustrating is just how long it seems to take Eddie to realise that things aren't quite right - hey, maybe chromatically-based slavery isn't such a great thing after all! Maybe people should be able to marry outside of their own colour! Maybe all those mysteriously disappearing people aren't going to some nice farm somewhere! As a reader, you figure out what's going on quite some time before poor old Eddie does. But that's a minor criticism of a book that's otherwise quite spectacular.

The wonderfully weird Jasper Fforde

Apparently there's a sequel to be released in 2016, which can't come soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. Give Jasper Fforde a go - I guarantee you've never read anything quite like his books ever before.

9/10