Books: Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde (2024)

 “Welcome to Chromatacia, where the societal hierarchy is strictly regulated by one's limited color perception. Civilization has been rebuilt after an unspoken “Something that Happened” five hundred years ago. Society is now color vision-segregated, professions, marriages, and leisure activities all dictated by an individual’s visual ability, and everything run by the shadowy National Color in far-off Emerald City. Out on the fringes of Red Sector West, twenty-year-old Eddie Russett is being bullied into an arranged marriage with the powerful DeMauve family, purples who hope to redden up their progeny’s color-viewing potential with Eddie’s gene stock. Their obnoxious daughter Violet is confident the marriage won’t hamper her style for too long because Eddie is about to go on trial for a murder he didn’t commit, and he’s pretty sure to be sent on a one-way trip to the Green Room for execution by soporific color exposure. Meanwhile, Eddie is engaged in an illegal relationship with his co-defendant, a Green, the charismatic, unpredictable, and occasionally deadly Jane Grey. Time is running out for Eddie and Jane to figure out how to save themselves. Negotiating the narrow boundaries of the Rules within their society, they search for a loophole—some truth of their world that has been hidden from its hyper-policed citizens.”

For the most part, Red Side Story is worth the 15 year gap between this book and Shades of Grey. And much like Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series (which will have an eighth and final novel, Dark Reading Matter, out in 2025), he brings forth similar ideas, but approaches the concept of a totalitarian future society from the same very different, yet skewed perspective. The good part of Red Side Story is we get some answers from the first book, but we still don’t get a clear understanding what the people of Collective are. They act and respond in a very human sort of way, but they also act like automatons much of the time, especially the Yellows who love rules – or highly functioning androids who believe they’re real. We get a better idea that the four sectors of the Chromatacia are some sort game board, I guess (?), or some sort of highly developed physiological computer/hologram program to test people’s reaction to a authoritarian the social order (The Book of Harmony and the tyrannical following of rules, and preventing free-thinking).

While those will be obviously answered in a third book, I was bothered by a few deus ex machine aspects that let them get away from certain death by the last minute intervention from other people. There were at least three very obvious parts, including the trip to Crimsololia and the timely arrival of Hanson (Angel-Creator?) who saves Eddie and Jane from Yellows who were assigned to murder them, drops a cache of Very Important Plot Points, then because he believes he’s killed them, leaves before Jane’s magic key saves them - so no harm no fowl. The second when the escape their doom from the crime of killing the Courtland from the first book, as well as the Yellows, by another timely arrival, and even their escape from Vermillion was too easy.

The Tin Men, along with the Apocryphal Man (named Baxter’s), are other helpful plot devices that make you realize that neither Eddie nor Jane are really solving any mystery of who and what they are –it’s being fed to them one spoonful at a time.

Still, Fforde’s deadpan and satirical humor shines through. His absurd worlds will remind many of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and Monty Python, which plays on the comedy of manners that British still think, is cool.

The set-up for book three is here, as well, but I found the ending a bit disappointing. I sense the plot is leaning towards a more formulaic ending rather than some Big Revelation. But we’ll have to wait see –just, I hope, not another fifteen years!