Jasper Fforde was one of my favorite authors in the first decade of the 2000s, from his Thursday Next series (starting with The Eyre Affair) to the two Nursery Crimes stories to his Shades of Grey, a brilliant, dystopian novel that ended on a still unresolved cliffhanger. I even got my daughter hooked on his young adult trilogy that began with The Last Dragonslayer, also still hanging as he decided to make it a tetralogy. All of his output screeched to a six-year halt, however, due to what he termed a “creative hiatus,” that ended with the long-awaited release in early 2019 of a new, standalone, self-contained novel, Early Riser.
Fforde started talking about this novel in the early 2010s, although I think it has undergone many changes since that point. It’s also a dystopian story, unrelated to Shades, this one in an alternate universe where the planet is exceptionally cold and humans must hibernate during winters. Set in Wales, where Fforde lives, the book follows Charlie Worthing as he’s brought into the equivalent of the night police in this world and uncovers a plot around “nightwalkers,” people whose cognitive functions have been severely impaired by interruptions to their winter sleep cycles. Such people, who kind of resemble docile zombies, take on menial labor tasks for the conglomerate HiberTech, which also produces the drug (Morphenox) that allows people to hibernate in dreamless sleep that doesn’t require the kind of calorie-loading other species must undertake before several months of slumber.
The rest of the story, however, just isn’t funny in any way. So many reviews cite how hilarious the book is, but it’s not – the story itself feels serious, and most of the plot itself tends towards the serious side. I can see places where Fforde tried to add some levity, such as the occasional, bold-and-italic “Whump” lines that indicate somebody got hit by surprise, but his light touch with dialogue and story are absent here. It makes sense on some level that Fforde is trying to tell a more serious tale here, with both an unsubtle climate-change allegory and a more directly anti-corporate take than the parodic Goliath of the Thursday Next series, but it’s distracting to read Fforde’s voice as if its affect has gone flat.
As for the story itself … it’s fine, nothing more. I never felt all that invested in Charlie’s story, or the person he ultimately tries to save, in part because I knew the former was going to work out (and had a rough idea of how) and because the latter character isn’t well developed enough before she ends up in jeopardy. It seems like Fforde might have wanted to go to a darker, creepier place than in his other books, but pulled up a little short rather than committing fully to creating something so contrary to his prior work. The dark of the novel – there are multiple scenes set outside in blizzard conditions, so Charlie can’t see what’s happening – doesn’t quite lend itself to the sense of foreboding that Fforde seemed to want. The result undermines a bit of the allegory within the book as well: I could understand the goal of the climate-change metaphor, but it felt distant from the plot itself.
The good news, I suppose, is that the creative hiatus is over, and Fforde’s next book, The Constant Rabbit, is due out in the UK in July of 2020, to be followed by the fourth and final Dragonslayer book within twelve months. He still owes us the Shades of Grey sequel and I suppose one more (final?) Thursday Next novel, but at least now he’s back to writing regularly.
Next up: I’m almost through Manjit Kumar’s Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality as well as Alan Alda’s If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
, last week. The first in the “Chronicles of Kazam” series, the book is quite Ffordian, just without the sex and swearing we’re used to from the Thursday Next books, yet still very ffunny and still willing to address big themes like death, moral choices, and greed. 
is just $3.03 right now.
, which he intended to be part two of an eventual Magicians trilogy. It does suffer a little from Middle-Book Syndrome, but that didn’t bother me as much as the split narrative that gives a lot of attention to the back story of one of the secondary characters from the first book, Julia. Denied admission to the magic school, Brakebills, that accepted her friend Quentin, Julia went through a difficult period of anger and depression, along with intermittent attempts to learn magic on her own, a path that ultimately brought her great pain even as she succeeded.
and Alan Bradley’s I Am Half-Sick of Shadows. Fforde’s book, the seventh in the Thursday Next series and likely the second-to-last as well, follows the literary detective, still recovering from the assassination attempt from book 5, reentering the workforce in a reduced role, even as Goliath Corporation is as determined as ever to figure out her secrets and probably kill her once they’re done with her. Their plans involve sending out synthetic Thursdays that look and sound like the real thing to try to con her friends and family into revealing confidential information. At the same time, the town of Swindon is grappling with news that the Almighty’s recent series of smitings will reach their town in a matter of days, a problem that Thursday’s polymath daughter, Tuesday, is trying desperately to solve. The story is clever, as always, but I have noticed over the last three books that they’re becoming much less funny. The old jokes are wearing off and Fforde seems to be struggling to replace them. Fforde’s site indicates we won’t get book eight, which I think will be the end of the series, until at least 2016.
, the fourth book in the Flavia de Luce series, has nothing to do with MLB’s postseason, but is another murder mystery involving the world’s most precocious prepubescent amateur chemist and detective. This time around, the murder occurs at Buckshaw, the estate of Flavia’s father, as half the town is snowed in during a charity performance by members of the cast of a film being shot at the house that week. There’s a surprising lack of chemistry in the main story here, as Flavia largely figures it out by deduction and old-fashioned snooping, although we get far more insight into the character of Dogger and hints of thawing from Flavia’s sisters, which I hope will continue in the next book, Speaking from Among the Bones, just recently out in hardcover.
, a slight departure from the first five books in the series in content and perspective.
, but before delving into that you should at least familiarize yourself with the plot of Jane Eyre (you can 
or just read a summary of the story), or else the key event in Fforde’s book won’t make much sense. Or, if you just want a taste of his writing style, check out 
the first of his two Nursery Crimes books, set in another part of BookWorld populated by characters from children’s books and, of course, nursery rhymes, where detectives Jack Spratt and Mary Mary attempt to answer the question of whether Humpty Dumpty fell … or was pushed.
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has its own alternate reality, a world many centuries (perhaps over a millennium) in the future where humans have devolved (or bred) to where most people can only see a single color, and which color you see and how strongly you see it affects your social and economic standing. The society of the book is called The Collective, a socialist enterprise with a long and strict set of rules known as the Word of Munsell – a reference to 
and its sequels are fantastic, but if you don’t know a little about British literature, you’ll miss too many of the jokes – I ended up re-reading the book after reading Jane Eyre, and only then did I fully understand why the book’s conclusion is so funny. Even the Nursery Crimes books, starting with 
(starring detective Jack Spratt and … well, you probably know about his wife), need a little knowledge of nursery rhymes for maximum enjoyment. I recommend everything he’s written, but Shades of Grey gives you an opportunity to enter the demented, witty mind of Jasper Fforde without having to finish any prereq’s.
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for over a year and finally tackled it this week, knocking it off in about four hours of active reading time. Fforde, after saying he was done with Thursday Next and banging out a Nursery Crimes novel, is back in top form.
(or, at worst, just rent one of the many film adaptations), since knowing that plot will make the key twist in Fforde’s book about eight times funnier.
while also listening to an audio version of 
.