Books: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde (2009)

 

“Hundreds of years in the future, the world is an alarmingly different place. Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is determined by your perception of color. Eddie Russett is an above-average Red who dreams of moving up the ladder. Until he is sent to the Outer Fringes where he meets Jane - a lowly Grey with an uncontrollable temper and a desire to see him killed. For Eddie, it is love at first sight. But his infatuation will lead him to discover that all is not as it seems in a world where everything that looks black and white is really shades of grey.”

First released in the UK in 2009 (published in the US in 2010 and I read it in 2011), Shades of Grey was supposed to be the beginning of a new dystopian trilogy situated in Chromatocia, a world ruled by the Colortocracy where color perception has faded and social hierarchy is determined by what colors you can see. 

Unfortunately, things did not go as planned. After writing for nearly decade plus with little time off, author Jasper Fforde schedule a tiny break to recharge his batteries. So after the seventh book in his Thursday Next was released in 2012, and with work already completed on his YA series The Last Dragonslayer: The Eye of Zoltar, which would be released in 2014, he began his leisure activity (mostly photography). But things grew quiet in his world. In his Acknowledgments for his 2018 novel Early Riser, he talks about what delayed this books release. He calls it his “creative hiatus of 2014-2016,” or in plainer language, writer’s block. And thus Early Riser, not a the second Shades of Grey novel, or a Thursday Next, or the fourth novel in The Last Dragonslayer series (which was only supposed to be three books) became his first adult novel to be released in 6 years. As he struggled out the pit, he was finally able to get back work but he’s playing catch up, now.

In my original review in 2011, I found the first half of the book slow going, which is a trademark of many fantasy writers. It does take Fforde a long time to set up his world, slowly revealing how the different colors people see influences their standing in society and the way the government functions as a whole –so at times it becomes a largely a plotless tome of world building, this first half. My opinion has not changed too much, but I did find myself more involved the second time around, which then made me wonder what exactly, is going on in this odd world.

The plot finally does kick in, and provides a satisfying setup for the two sequels. Sadly, no one, let alone Fforde, thought it would take 15 years to get book two. Nevertheless, one hopes that Red Side Story, coming in May of 2024, will go smoother with all the heavy lifting done in this book. We know the third book will not be out next year, as the eighth novel in the Thursday Next series (the last one was 2011) is due in 2025.

For us American’s not familiar with the Western half of the UK, details reveal that East Carmine is located in Wales (the A470 road is mentioned), and the description of the town close to the lower of a series of five dams suggests it is Rhayader, at the foot of the Elan Valley. Nearby Rusty Hill was once Builth Wells. The town of Vermillion used to be Hereford. The town of High Saffron is on the coast beyond the dams, which suggests Aberystwyth.

So, at its base elements, Shades of Grey is just a clever, very elaborate social and political satire –a sub-genre of comedy/humor that British have done so well for decades with. It’s also poking fun at the whole dystopian genre. It is whimsical, without being to over the top and its verbal wordplay will remind many of Douglas Adams and Monty Python.

I do believe Fforde should be more popular here in the States than he currently is, but I also understand that satire –be it political, social, or dystopian - is not everyone’s cup of tea. But he really is a very witty man with an ingenious, sharp and adroit talent for finding a joke in the oddest of places.  

Books: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (1987)

I had been reading Shada, the Doctor Who story from 1979 that got canceled due to a production stoppage at the BBC. Douglas Adams, who wrote Shada, never wanted that story novelized –mostly because he felt the serial was weak (see this posting). However, in 1987 he released Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. That novel recycled bits from Shada and another Doctor Who story he wrote, City of Death. So, after reading Gareth Roberts version of Shada, I pulled out my old copy of Dirk Gently, and for the first time since it was released 25 years ago, I re-read it. 

While the novel is nonlinear, it basically starts four billion years in Earth's past, when a group of alien Salaxalans attempt to populate the earth. But a mistake caused by their engineer – who used an Electric Monk to irrationally believe the proposed fix would work – causes their landing craft to explode, killing the Salaxalans and generating the spark of energy needed to start the process of life on Earth. The ghost of the Salaxalan engineer roams the earth waiting to undo his mistake, watching human life develop and waiting to find a soul that it can possess. 

The above plot element was part of Adam’s City of Death serial of Doctor Who.

To help accelerate things, the Salaxalan ghost encounters  Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 19^th Century  and tries to influence the writer to add a second section to "Kubla Khan" and alter parts of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to describe how to correct the problem that destroyed the landing craft in the distant past. The ghost later discovers that Professor Urban "Reg" Chronotis (the same, yet different one featured in Shada) at St Cedd's possesses a time machine disguised as his quarters and in the late 20th Century, during the annual St Cedd's dinner reading of "Kubla Khan", the ghost influences Reg to use the time machine to perform a bit of trickery for a young child at the dinner, while the ghost lures another Electric Monk into Reg's quarters. Upon return to the present, the ghost finds the Monk unusable for its purposes. The Monk then goes off to kill Wayforward Technologies II's CEO, Gordon Way, due to a misunderstanding.

What amazes me about this book, and about Douglas Adams, was while the plot is complicated and at times very confusing, it is also a clever science fiction novel that tries –as Dirk believes in, the "fundamental interconnectedness of all things", where many details that may appear to be superfluous, turn out to be integral to the plot. It is also, in many ways, a smart novel – the characters talk on the concept of Schrödinger's Cat, which Dirk uses to determine Richard MacDuff’s mental state, with Richard producing clear and rational arguments for why the experiment proposed in the theory cannot be carried out in reality.

It makes little sense to me. But that’s why I think Adams was way ahead of his times, and why his death in 2001 at the age of 49 (same as I am now) was such a huge loss. Otherwise, the novel is whimsical and written in typical Adams style for silly humor and thought provoking ideas. 

I should re-read this book more often.