Shades of Grey.

I did a quick chat today on my flight back from the SEC tournament, although the connection was a little sluggish and I didn’t get to as many questions as I usually do. I wrote about Drew Pomeranz and Anthony Ranaudo on Wednesday evening, and did a now-somewhat-dated first-round projection on Monday. I’ll update that projection over the weekend, and the new version should be out on Memorial Day.

—

I’m an unabashed Jasper Fforde ffan, recommending his books to friends, family members, and just about any of you who ask for a book recommendation. His original series involved the literary detective Thursday Next and was set in an alternate reality where the world inside books exists and can even interact with and be manipulated by people in our world. (Oddly enough, this reality also has Wales as an independent communist state.) The first book involves a villain who kills a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit and stops the plot of Jane Eyre in its tracks. His second series, Nursery Crimes, branched off from Thursday Next’s world, instead playing with the characters from childrens’ stories, including a menacing Gingerbread Man and the happily married Punch and Judy, who still beat the tar out of each other.

Fforde has left this literary realm for a new series, with the first book released in December after a delay of over a year. Shades of Grey 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 Albert Henry Munsell, who devised a three-dimensional taxonomy for classifying colors. And there seems to be a chronic shortage of spoons.

Enter the protagonist, nineteen-year-old Eddie Russett, who has been sent with his color-healer father to the distant town of East Carmine as a punishment, ostensibly for a prank played on the son of a prefect in his original town, but who begins to sense that East Carmine is rife with corruption and might have even seen a murder, allegedly a thing of the past in Chromatacia. As Eddie begins to dig – while trying to avoid Jane Grey, who has a reputation for doing violence to anyone who crosses her or mentions her quite retroussé nose – he runs afoul of the Gamboge family, who wield tremendous power in East Carmine, and is also taxed in trying to maintain his half-promised engagement to Constance Oxblood, a wealthy family desperate to marry its daughter off to someone with high red perception like Eddie.

Shades of Grey is macabre, twisted, and funny, like all Fforde novels, but with a stronger undercurrent of even social criticism. Much of Chromatacia’s social structure resembles that of the old Catholic Church, from strict adherence to scripture (the aforementioned Word of Munsell) to the ruling class’ use of fear and uncertainty as a tool to keep the lower classes, particularly the laboring Greys, who are one step above slaves, oppressed. Chromatacia’s socialist system also comes in for some withering satire, as the system is inherently corrupt and open to abuse by people at all levels who shirk their duties or find ways to line their pockets outside of the official reckoning. And, of course, there are obvious parallels to racial or socioeconomic prejudices, although Fforde doesn’t overplay them, and the perceptive-versus-Grey dichotomy is muted by all of the infighting among Yellows, Reds, and Purples.

Fforde’s wordplay, a huge element in his earlier series, is still in evidence here, including the references to Munsell and the name of the test used to determine color perception – Ishihara, named for the man who devised those circles of dots used to test for color blindness. He has fun with names, delving into some obscure colors while also offering some puns and other almost-unforgivable combinations like the Grey named Zane, and he even crafts a little slang for his artificial world, such as the term used for people who abuse certain shades of green that heal pain or give pleasure when viewed – “chasing the frog.”

The great benefit of Shades of Grey for anyone new to Fforde is that it requires no foreknowledge – you’ll catch more allusions if you’re familiar with colors and a little of the science of color, but you could read this book cold and still enjoy it. The Eyre Affair 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 The Big Over Easy (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.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s Angels on Toast.