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!

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: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde (2010)

Taking a page from 1984 and other dystopian novels, Jasper Fforde creates a horrid English future, but without the usual tropes of the genre such as storm troopers, surveillance robots, or a super-computer. What time in the future this new series is set is not fully revealed, but Fforde does give hints, suggesting that (from my point of view) its somewhere in the late 24th or early 25th Century. History is relegated to a centuries-ago "Previous," which came to an abrupt end by "Something That Happened."

In Shades of Grey we are introduced to the citizens of Chromatacia who are layered by color, which are funneled and continually adjusted by underground pipes that also maintain the greener than green parks and brightly hued storefronts of a society whose leader, the axiom-prone Munsell, may or may not exist. Chromatacia has a sort of Boy Scout way of doing things insomuch as merits are given out for good behavior and keeping the status quo. Demerits are given for some of the smallest infractions, and they come with instructions on how humility is better. Humility keeps people from asking too many questions and thus keeps it populace busy doing pointless tasks. At the top are the arrogant Yellows and the bottom is the Greys, who are treated with a sort of respect (because “rules are rules,”) but are treated like cheap labor –which is a problem, as there seems to be a labor shortage going on. What we have in between is an assortment of color-coded middles with Last Names right out of any paint catalog. All these middles are in an endless quest for any sort of minor upward mobility that will enhance their color. And here, you are what you see, and perception is limited by an individual's access to gradations of his own or other colors, and social order depends upon the incuriosity of its citizens from birth until they die, appropriately, of the dread disease Mildew. But like any totalitarian society, there are leaks and there are traces of that long gone society all over the place. The traces that remain of that bygone world are available to a ghostly underclass that roams free because the populace is under orders to pretend they're invisible, or to those with enhanced perception. 

Entering stage left, is 20 year-old Eddie Russett and his father into the Outer Fringe town of East Carmine. Eddie has a middling color, but he’s also gifted with a powerful ability to see more Red than he should, but he’s been sort of “exiled” here after running afoul of Prefects of his home town, Jade-Under-Lime, who did not like his idea of improving queue lines. But things go a bit out of hand almost as so as he arrives, as he discovers Jane –a Grey with an attitude who threatens to break Eddie’s jaw- who seems to hold secrets about many things. Soon Eddie discovers the leaks within Chromatacia, East Carmine and the Head Office. And his curiosity about the death of a resident and his desire to be closer to Jane may end up getting him killed as he begins to understand that all is not well.

In Shades of Grey, we see a lot of bad things happen to good people (keep in mind Spock’s saying of the “needs of the many”), and we see a creative spin on a totalitarian society by the ever clever Jasper Fforde, who also created another brilliant universe with his Thursday Next series. The one drawback to Shades of Grey is that Fforde seems to enjoy this World Building so much so, at times, it costs in the narrative flow of the book. Like the first Thursday Next book, which seemed to take forever to get going due to this, Grey suffers the same fate. Still, if you stick with it, your rewarded with Fforde’s brilliant, literate humor and supporting characters right out of a Charles Dickens novel.