Shades of Grey: A Novel [Paperback]

Jasper Fforde (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 1, 2011

The New York Times bestseller and "a rich brew of dystopic fantasy and deadpan goofiness" (The Washington Post)

Welcome to Chromatacia, where the societal hierarchy is strictly regulated by one's limited color perception. And Eddie Russet wants to move up. But his plans to leverage his better-than-average red perception and marry into a powerful family are quickly upended. Juggling inviolable rules, sneaky Yellows, and a risky friendship with an intriguing Grey named Jane who shows Eddie that the apparent peace of his world is as much an illusion as color itself, Eddie finds he must reckon with the cruel regime behind this gaily painted façade.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This inventive fantasy from bestseller Fforde (The Eyre Affair) imagines a screwball future in which social castes and protocols are rigidly defined by acuteness of personal color perception. Centuries after the cryptically cataclysmic Something That Happened, a Colortocracy, founded on the inflexible absolutes of the chromatic scale, rules the world. Amiable Eddie Russett, a young Red, is looking forward to marrying a notch up on the palette and settling down to a complacent bourgeois life. But after meeting Jane G-23, a rebellious working-class Grey, and a discredited, invisible historian known as the Apocryphal man, Eddie finds himself questioning the hitherto sacred foundations of the status quo. En route to finding out what turned things topsy-turvy, Eddie navigates a vividly imagined landscape whose every facet is steeped in the author's remarkably detailed color scheme. Sometimes, though, it's hard to see the story for the chromotechnics. 10-city author tour. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In Eddie Russett’s world, color is destiny. People’s perceptions of color, once tested, determine their rank in the Colortocracy, with primes ruling “bastard” colors and everyone lording it over the prole-like grays. No one can see more than their own color, and no one knows why—but there are many unknowns ever since Something Happened, followed by the deFacting and successive Great Leaps Backward. Due to an infraction against the Collective’s rule-bound bureaucracy, Eddie is sent to East Carmine, in the Outer Fringes, where manners are shockingly poor, to conduct a monthlong chair census. In short order, he falls in love, runs afoul of the local prefects, learns a terrible secret, and is eaten by a carnivorous tree. This series starter combines the dire warnings of Brave New World and 1984 with the deevolutionary visions of A Canticle for Leibowitz and Riddley Walker, but, Fforde being Fforde, his dystopia includes an abundance of tea shops and a severe shortage of jam varieties. It’s all brilliantly original. If his complex world building sometimes slows the plot and the balance of silly and serious is uneasy, we’re still completely won over. In our own willful myopia, we sorely need the laughs. --Keir Graff --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (March 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143118587
• ISBN-13: 978-0143118589
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (151 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,085 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jasper Fforde traded a varied career in the film industry for staring vacantly out of the window and arranging words on a page. He lives and writes in Wales. The Eyre Affair was his first novel in the bestselling Thursday Next series. He is also the author of the Nursery Crime series.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

104 of 112 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm a Blue, my ex is Orange--this explains so much... December 29, 2009

By Susan Tunis TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

6.1.02.11.235: Artifiacture from before the Something That Happened may be collected, so long as it does not appear on the Leapback list or possess color above 23 percent saturation.

Did you understand that? You would if you were Eddie Russett, the 20-year-old, first-person narrator of Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron. Eddie knows that the above is one of Munsell's innumerable Rules. "The Word of Munsell was the Rules, and the Rules were the Word of Munsell. They regulated everything we did, and had brought peace to the Collective for nearly four centuries. They were sometimes very odd indeed: The banning of the number that lay between 72 and 74 was a case in point, and no one had ever fully explained why it was forbidden to count sheep, make any new spoons or use acronyms. But they were the Rules..." Not surprisingly, this is a society that has embraced "loopholery" enthusiastically.

Eddie's society is a Colortocracy, where social status isn't determined by merit or by birth, it's determined by which color(s) of the spectrum you can see, and how much of them. Eddie's a Red, which is next to lowest on the totem pole. Oranges are higher than Reds, Yellows higher than Oranges, and so on. The only ones lower than Reds are the Greys, or achromatics. They can't see any color at all. They're the unappreciated workers of this society.

In Shades of Grey, Jasper Fforde has created a richly imagined future that revolves entirely around color, and the perception of it. Explains Eddie, "No one could cheat the Colorman and the color test. What you got was what you were, forever. Your life, career and social standing decided right there and then, and all worrisome life uncertainties eradicated forever. You knew who you were, what you would do, where you would go and what was expected of you."

As the novel opens, Eddie doesn't want much from life. He wants to fulfill his Civil Obligations as best he can. He wants to marry into the prestigious Oxblood family. And he does have a few fairly radical ideas about improved ways to queue. Other than that, he wants to avoid the perils of swans, lightning, and mildew. But that's before he travels for the first time in his life, to the Outer Fringes, where the Rules are interpreted differently. Eddie's a fish out of water, and we're meeting people and learning about life in the village of East Carmine right along with him.

It is there that Eddie meets an intriguing Grey named Jane. He's smitten immediately, and that's even before she threatens to kill him. Jane, rude in a world without rudeness, violent in world without violence, leads Eddie gradually down a path that has him questioning everything he thought he knew about the Colortocracy--in a world that most definitely does not value questions or those that ask them.

By now, you may have gathered that this novel is a bit of a departure for Fforde. There is so much going on that it's hard to take it all in, and virtually impossible to summarize. While undeniably funny, the humor is darker and a bit less overt. Shades of Grey is more challenging, sophisticated, and substantive than anything we've seen previously from Mr. Fforde. In a word, it's brilliant! The cleverness he has always displayed in his Thursday Next novels is dialed up several notches here, as he points his satirical eye at a world so strange and outlandish that comparisons to our own are inescapable. I'm not convinced that all of the Fforde Ffanatics will embrace this latest work, but I suspect most will. And I, for one, will be looking forward with great enthusiasm to Shades of Grey 2: Painting by Numbers and Shades of Grey 3: The Gordini Protocols.

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars There will be spoons January 6, 2010

By S. Lionel TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Oh, how I missed Jasper Fforde! I devoured his Thursday Next series and then the Nursery Crime books, and definitely had mixed feelings when he wrote that his next book would be delayed a year due to the birth of his new daughter. (I understand, really, but I also wanted to read more Fforde!)

At last, we have Shades of Grey, and it's both like and unlike anything Fforde has published before. Like, because it gives us a richly imagined world with absurd-sounding details, yet it all hangs together. Unlike, because Shades of Grey is firmly on the side of science fiction whereas his other books I'd call fantasy.

It is some unspecified time in the future. An "Epiphany" occurred some hundreds of years in the past - nobody knows what it was - that changed the world. Most people can see only one shade of color - the higher up the spectrum you can see, the higher your social status. Those who can't see colors at all are Greys and are generally a servant class, but not entirely. It is possible to move up and down the social strata through marriage, and children are reclassified by a color test given when they are 20.

We meet our hero, Eddie Russett, a Red, as he is being digested by a carnivorous tree, into which he was thrown by Jane, the Grey woman who has turned his life upside down. I spent a large part of the book wondering how this would be resolved, since Eddie is narrating the story and this implies he somehow moved past this fate. We shall see....

As Eddie learns more about how his society works, he has more questions. This does not endear him to the community leaders, since their society is rigidly structured according to the rules laid down by "Munsell" some centuries past. Many of the rules don't make a lot of sense - such as why manufacture of forks is permitted but not spoons - but the populace manages, sometimes finding loopholes in the rules. Despite periodic "Leapbacks", where selected technology is destroyed, some tech remains, such as the self-maintaining Perpetualite roads and the Everspin motors that never slow down. Remnants of the "Previous" are held onto, though often misinterpreted (such as the "Parker Brothers Map of the World", which is a Risk game board.)

Eddie's questions and moral development lead him into danger, into confrontation with Jane, and gradual revelation as to what's really going on. It is not all pleasant and Eddie is forced to make extremely difficult choices. Throughout the book Fforde's vision is very colorful, if you'll excuse the term. The level of detail provided is astounding, perplexing and entertaining.

As in Fforde's other books, you are simply deposited in the new world without any explanation, and you are expected to pick things up as you go. It is a style similar to CJ Cherryh. Another author I'm reminded of is Matt Ruff, who has a similarly overactive imagination, though his books are typically darker than Fforde's.

The end of the book is classic Fforde, however. I don't want to elaborate on that. What I was not prepared for was the note that this was the first in a planned trilogy. I don't mind book series, but I do find it annoying when an author does not tie up important plot elements by the final pages, which is what happens here. I very much want to read the next installments in the series, and hope it will not be another two years before I get to do so.

If you enjoyed any of Fforde's other books, you'll get a kick out of this one. If you haven't met Fforde before, by all means start here, but don't miss his Thursday Next series.

48 of 57 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Quintessential Fforde. December 29, 2009

By Nicole Del Sesto

Format:Hardcover

9.3.88.32.025: The cucumber and the tomato are both fruit; the avocado is a nut. To assist with the dietary requirements of vegetarians, on the first Tuesday of the month a chicken is officially a vegetable.

If you've read and loved Fforde in the past stop right here. There's no need to read this review. Shades of Grey is Fforde at his Ffordy best. Buy, read, enjoy.

I really feel that this is one of those books that it's best not to know anything about before you start reading it. But you seem rather committed to reading this review, so I'll continue.

It feels like there's a nod to both Brave New World and We (Modern Library Classics), though I've never read anything quite like this. Once again, Fforde takes us into a cleverly devised fictional world, filled with his satire, humor and social commentary. A world where the cause of death could be "mildew", "Nightloss", or accidental beheading by the guillotine at the linoleum factory.

Green is the drug of choice, and beige is quite rightly Hell, and I can't even begin to expound upon the Perpetulite.

"I'm not a big fact person," said Mr. Crimson, who was honest, even if a twit. "Unproved speculation is more my thing ... "

This book is the first in a trilogy. Enjoy.