Shades of Grey: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ Jasper Fforde (Author)

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.)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Ron Charles Remember that kid in middle school who sat off by himself during lunch reciting Monty Python skits? You must track him down (parents' house: basement) and send him a copy of Jasper Fforde's "Shades of Grey." This insanely clever novel from the author of the best-selling "Thursday Next" series sounds like a cult classic for people who crave a rich brew of dystopic fantasy and deadpan goofiness. Shifting away from his postmodern literary parodies, which began with "The Eyre Affair" in 2001, Fforde has now created his most original story, an elaborate social satire about a weird but oddly familiar world almost 500 years in the future. Every page of this high-concept novel (the first of a projected trilogy) glistens with ingenious details. The era you and I live in, the Previous, has long since vanished into the mists of time, but a single map remains of our pre-Epiphanic society: the Parker Brothers' board game Risk, which provides a somewhat misleading impression of antiquity. This brave new world, the love child of Aldous Huxley and Franz Kafka, is dominated by a rigid apartheid society, what its citizens call a Colortocracy: Each person's status is determined not by skin color but by the ability to perceive color. "Color, and the enjoyment thereof, was everything," Fforde writes, as he paints a culture that speaks and thinks entirely in terms of hues, shades and pigments. Citizens take their place in the Chromatic scale, an inviolate caste system -- the Reds, the Yellows, the Blues -- that strictly forbids intermarriage between complementary colors. People who can't see any color at all -- the Greys, which make up about a third of the population -- toil away as a kind of slave race. Branded with a bar code and sporting the appropriate colored badge, "You know who you were," Fforde writes, "what you would do, where you would go and what was expected of you." Enlightenment is worse than death. But that's just the beginning of this Lewis Carroll madness tinted with steampunk. The palette of Fforde's comedy is immense. Except for linoleum production, industry exists only to harvest scraps of ancient relics and extract their pigments, which are then pumped around to various towns through a massive network of pipes for the maintenance of artificial gardens. All other technology is incrementally abandoned in a series of Progressive Leapbacks: telephones, automobiles, indoor lighting -- all given up, along with more and more of the books in the library through a process called "deFacting." (The library staff presides proudly over their emptying shelves: "There was Catch-22," one diligent librarian says, "which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.") Fforde is like the stand-up comic in a gulag; his silly but cerebral humor prances through this dreary place without missing a beat. The harried souls of his color-obsessed world are controlled by what sounds like a prep-school rulebook, endlessly elaborated and corrupted over the centuries, though a vast system of "loopholery" has developed in response. Quotations from their infallible leader open each chapter with dollops of straight-faced absurdity. Spoon production is strictly forbidden; swearing, acronyms, clothing and sex are all regulated; and musicals are the only form of entertainment ("Red Side Story," "Repaint Your Wagon," "Ochrlahoma!"). And then, and then, and then . . . . Oh, it's hard not to get lost in the marvelous details of this novel, which is pretty much what happens to the plot. Very lightly strung through all this bubbling exposition is the slow story of a young naif named Eddie Russett, whose father is a Chromaticologist who heals people with swatches of carefully blended hues. Sent to the outer-fringe town of East Carmine to learn humility, Eddie finds himself stumbling upon a series of suspicious deaths. He has no intention of causing trouble -- he's a good Red set to begin a life of well-regulated ease -- but he falls irresistibly in love with a spunky Grey named Jane who threatens to break his arm. And then his nose. Who could resist such foreplay? Slowly, Jane takes the rose-colored glasses from Eddie's eyes and forces him to see what's really going on in the Colortocracy. As a satire of planned economies and repressive governments, "Shades of Grey" reaches toward "1984," but thematically it isn't as profound as its clever props suggest. That becomes distressingly clear at climactic moments when All Is Explained in the most colorless and obvious ways. "I had a sense that everything about the Collective was utterly and completely wrong," Eddie says, long after that thought has occurred even to the greyest reader. "We should be dedicating our lives to gaining knowledge, not to losing it." You think? The level of suspense is so tepid that from hundreds of pages away, you can hear Charlton Heston yelling, "Soylent Green is people! We've got to stop them somehow!" To be fair, part of the problem is timing. We've already read "1984" and "Harrison Bergeron" and "Fahrenheit 451" and a dozen other trenchant satirical assaults on the evils of societies that perpetuate themselves by infantilizing populations with inane regulations. But where besides North Korea and a few other pariah states would "Shades of Grey" make anyone see red nowadays? Both the thrills and the romantic comedy pick up during the final quarter, but as much as it hurts to say it, color me disappointed. [e-mail]
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (December 29, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670019631
• ISBN-13: 978-0670019632
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,201 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 40 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 (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (VINE VOICE)

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.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More Jasper Fforde is always welcome, December 31, 2009

By	Marika McCoola (New York) - See all my reviews

Ever since I picked up a copy of The Eyre Affair at a used bookstore in Chicago, I've been a bit obsessed with Jasper Fforde. Now on my second copy of The Eyre Affair (the first was lent and never returned) and with an addiction to the audio versions of his books as well, I hunger when I hear of a new publication.

I have been looking forward to Shades of Grey ever since the teaser went up on Fforde's website. Unfortunately, the publication date was released, delayed, delayed again, and then finally established (of course, no matter when the release date is, it is always too far away). Lucky for me, the appearance of an advanced reader's copy at the bookstore I work at meant no more waiting.


For those of you unfamiliar with Fforde's work, he has written the Thursday Next series, the Nursery Crimes series, and now, Shades of Grey (the first in a trilogy). If you haven't read Fforde before, start with the Thursday Next novels, move to Nursery Crime, an then pick up the newest. While Thursday Next is certainly my favorite, Fforde's bizarre worlds and witty British humor are enjoyable in each of his series. Enough of this chatter- on to Shades of Grey.

Shades of Grey starts off slowly. Fforde's new world is complex and confusing and it takes a good quarter of the book to establish an understanding of world and how it works. This initial section sets up the entirety of the book and if you hang in there, you will be rewarded. Fforde's new world is wonderful; it has amazing potential which I hope will be reached in the sequels now that the whole messy business of explaining things is over.

The protagonist, Eddie Russett, is a fine, upstanding young man who truly wants the best for people. While he is not the sharpest tack in the tin, he understands the purpose of rules and governments, and how they can be used or abused. His easy going and generally genial nature allows him to befriend a host of individuals. Jane balances him well. She is smart, knowledgeable, volatile, and emotional. Together they create a dynamic pair who you hope will succeed in their plans (which I will not reveal to you).

With an intricate new world, endearing characters, and a political problem to be solved, Shades of Grey is a novel exploring the evils and corruption of governments and societies. But this intense science-fiction is tempered by Fforde's delightful humor, so even those fictioneers who scoff at utopian novels may find something to love.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Nicole Del Sesto (Northern Cal) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.