Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

From the Publisher

An astonishing, hotly anticipated new novel from the great literary fantasist and creator of Thursday Next, Jasper Fforde.

As long as anyone can remember, society has been ruled by a Colortocracy. From the underground feedpipes that keep the municipal park green to the healing hues viewed to cure illness to a social hierarchy based upon one's limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.

Young Eddie Russett has no ambition to be anything other than a loyal drone of the Collective. With his better-than-average red perception, he could well marry Constance Oxblood and inherit the string works; he may even have enough red perception to make prefect.

For Eddie, life looks colorful. Life looks good.

But everything changes when he moves with his father, a respected swatchman, to East Carmine. There, he falls in love with a Grey named Jane who opens his eyes to the painful truth behind his seemingly perfect, rigidly controlled society.

Curiosity--a dangerous trait to display in a society that demands total conformity--gets the better of Eddie, who beings to wonder:
Why are there not enough spoons to go around?
Why is everything--and everyone--barcoded?
What happened to all the people who never returned from High Saffron?
And why, when you begin to question the world around you, do black-and- white certainties reduce themselves to shades of grey?

Part satire, part romance, part revolutionary thriller, this is the new world from the creative and comic genius of Jasper Fforde.

The Washington Post - 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…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…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…Lewis Carroll madness tinted with steampunk. The palette of Fforde's comedy is immense.

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.)

Library Journal

Can the postapocalypse be funny? If the author is Fforde (The Eyre Affair; The Big Over Easy), then yes. All the hallmarks of dystopian fiction are here: a rigid collective with Kafkaesque rules, an oppressed underclass looking to revolt, and the moldering ruins of a technologically advanced civilization that perished long ago. But there is also humor, wit, and mystery in this wonderfully weird new world where color and people's ability to perceive it govern society. Eddie Russett is just trying to earn enough merits to marry well when he is sent with his father, Holden, to the Outer Fringes, where they find some questions—such as what exactly happened to the "swatchman" Holden is replacing, and why has no one ever returned from High Saffron? But curiosity is actively discouraged by the Collective, and Eddie is soon in trouble, with only one potential ally—if she would just stop punching him. VERDICT Fforde has built a complex, engaging, and unique world full of surprises, serious ideas, and serious fun that will appeal to those beyond the author's readers and sf fans. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/09.]—Devon Thomas, DevIndexing, Chelsea, MI

Kirkus Reviews

The world of the near future is anything but an ashen wasteland in the impish British author's refreshingly daft first volume of a new fantasy series. Already cult-worshipped for his popular Thursday Next and Nursery Crimes novels (First Among Sequels, 2007, etc.) Fforde is something like a contemporary Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. He's a shameless punster with a demonic flair for groan-worthy parodies and lampoons, and it's just too much bother to try to resist his greased-pig narratives. In this one, which does take place in a possibly post-apocalyptic world, a repressive Colortocracy ranks and separates citizens according to their ability to perceive particular colors. For example, haughty Greens and dictatorial Yellows ("Gamboges") deem Red-ness hopelessly lower class. It's as if 1984 were ruled by Coco Chanel. Our hero, Eddie Russett (a Red, naturally), is an affable young man who hangs out with his father Holden (a healer known as a swatchman), killing time until his arranged marriage to fellow Red Constance Oxblood. But when son and father resettle in the odd little hamlet of East Carmine, the lad's eyes are opened to a confusion of standards and mores, and the realities of sociopolitical unrest. While serving his punishment for a school prank by compiling a "chair census," Eddie visits fascinating new places, enjoys the wonders of the UnLibrary and the organized worship of Oz, and decides that conscientious resistance to entrenched authority probably won't bring about the ultimate ecological catastrophe-Mildew. He's a little less sure about his wavering infatuation with Jane, a militant, pissed-off Grey (they're the proles) who rather enjoys abusing him. Eventually, the best andbrightest prosper, while characters of another color end up in the relational red (so to speak). All this is serenely silly, but to dispel a black mood and chase away the blues, this witty novel offers an eye-popping spectrum of remedies. A grateful hue and cry (as well as sequels) may be anticipated.

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