I’ve been sitting on a hardcover copy of this book for YEARS, waiting for the right time to read it. The long-promised two sequels seemed nowhere in sight, so I figured no harm in waiting. And now that it looks like the second book* is on it’s way for next year at the earliest, 2017 at the latest, I figured it was about time. I am also feeling resentful and wanting to take back the phrase “Shades of Grey” from certain . . . sectors. And what a fresh breath of weirdness it turned out to be.
*WHERE IS MY NEXT NURSERY CRIME BOOK, JASPER. WHERE.
Undoubtedly, Jasper Fforde is a writer of silly books, but with Shades of Grey (subtitled The Road to High Saffron in order to distinguish it from its forthcoming sequels) — which is indeed a very silly book — he’s also got something with some heft to it. This is a satire like his other books, but it’s also a dystopia, which is new territory for him. The Nursery Crime books satirize our culture through fairy-tales, and the Thursday Next books are alt-histories that do the same with stories and a surplus of imagination. But the Shades of Grey series actually has a sheen of realism to it. Mind you, just a sheen. We’re not talking hard-hitting documentary here. This is a world where people use the color green as a narcotic and where spoons are highly prized objects.
It’s also the most joyfully weird dystopia I’ve ever read.
The premise of Shades of Grey, which takes place in Britain an unknown number of centuries from now, is that there was The Something That Happened, and all the people (whom the characters call The Previous) died off, leaving new humans upon the Earth who can now only see one color with their tiny little pupils (which also prevent them from seeing anything at night). Society is segregated by these colors, and certain colors have more prestige than others. Additionally, the more of a color you can see (which is measured upon adulthood with an official test), the higher up within your color you are. Color, or lack thereof, permeates every aspect of their lives. Citizens earn merits that they often use to purchase synthetic colors, and a great deal of time and effort is spent salvaging true color from the wild and turning it in concentrated form into synthetic color (which is fast running out). In addition, the society is rigidly controlled from the top. Citizens who don’t have enough merits are sent to reboot camp. Citizens are told where they will work, and marriages are arranged for optimal color production in children. Technology is also frequently leapt back, seemingly at random (in the book, telephones have only recently been taken away).
But that’s just the background. The real story starts when our main character, Eddie Russett, is sent with his father the Swatchman (a person who heals with color combinations) to a fringe village in order to earn some Humility for a prank he played on another boy. The fringes are very different, and he soon finds himself drawn into questioning for the first time why his world is the way it is.
Most dystopian novels are endlessly bleak, but sometimes that level of bleakness gets old and actually works against the message the author is trying to impart. And certainly, Fforde sticks some disturbing stuff in here amidst all the humorous oddities. But it’s precisely that level of absurdity that makes the satire so effective. The society these people live in is structured in such a ridiculous manner, but has just enough similarities to our own, that the absurdity of some of our own behavior is easily reflected in it. (It also helps that you don’t come out of the book wanting to smack your own head against a wall in despair.)
Eddie and Jane, the grey girl he quickly falls in love with, are definitely the absurdo-world version of Winston and Julia from 1984, but for me that only adds to the book’s charm. The dynamic between the haplessly naïve Eddie and the seemingly caustic, rebellious Jane was my favorite part of the book. In fact, this whole book could be called the absurdo-world 1984, and that wouldn’t be an insult to either book.
My only real complaint is that the plot takes a while to get going, because Fforde has to set up the world, which he does set up pretty organically. There isn’t really any exposition. But it does seem for about 100 pages or so that the things we’re learning are just set decoration, although it turns out that almost all of it is relevant to the plot. This won’t ever be an issue for me on re-read, but it definitely was before I knew how it would all turn out.
If you haven’t tried Jasper Fforde’s writing before, I would highly recommend this as a starting point. It’s probably his most mature and well-written book, even if it’s not his funniest*. If you’ve read Fforde before and found him lacking, you might still like this because it’s of a different flavor than what you’re used to.
*It’s still pretty fucking funny, though.
And now I really do hope that the internet isn’t lying to me when it says book two will be out next year because I really want it.*
*AND THE THIRD NURSERY CRIME BOOK, JASPER.
