Jasper Fforde: Shades of grey (2010, Viking)
English language
Published Jan. 6, 2010 by Viking.
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 …
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.
Das Beste was ich seit Langem gelesen habe. Wie schon bei den Thursday-Next-Büchern erweist sich Jasper Fforde als wahrer Meister im Bauen von kuriosen Welten.
Shades of Grey, the first in its series, has a plot that is very hard to describe. Jasper Fforde is impressively creative and witty, but for whatever reason, I did not find this especially riveting, though I liked it for its quirkiness. This is not the laugh-out-loud fest The Eyre Affair was, but humorous, nonetheless.
Actually, Jasper Fforde's own review (cuddlebuggery.com/blog/2013/05/30/review-shades-of-grey-by-jasper-fforde/) is pretty funny. It really is a relief to find out where all the spoons went.
In this case, I suspect the sequels may be funnier, partly because the reader will have had the chance to digest some of the rules at work in this bizarre world.
Almost seven years after my first reading, again earns four stars!
I may have enjoyed this book more than the first book of either the Thursday Next series or the Nursery Crime series, and that's saying a lot.
One thing that is a little off-putting is Fforde's style of writing his novels--even the firsts--as if the reader already knows and understands the world Fforde has created. To some extent, this can be an interesting style of revelation for the reader, but I do think Fforde overdoes it.
In thinking about the book for this review, I just subtracted one star from my rating. This is because I realized how disappointed I was in the ending. Don't get me wrong, the ending was satisfying enough. For me, however, it definitely had this feeling of abruptness that completely contradicted the pacing of the rest of the novel that preceded it. This could have easily been a stand-alone story right up until the last …
I may have enjoyed this book more than the first book of either the Thursday Next series or the Nursery Crime series, and that's saying a lot.
One thing that is a little off-putting is Fforde's style of writing his novels--even the firsts--as if the reader already knows and understands the world Fforde has created. To some extent, this can be an interesting style of revelation for the reader, but I do think Fforde overdoes it.
In thinking about the book for this review, I just subtracted one star from my rating. This is because I realized how disappointed I was in the ending. Don't get me wrong, the ending was satisfying enough. For me, however, it definitely had this feeling of abruptness that completely contradicted the pacing of the rest of the novel that preceded it. This could have easily been a stand-alone story right up until the last 3 chapters (or in Fforde's case, 11 pages). It's almost as if it was going to be a stand-alone, but then someone had the brilliant idea to make it a series. Thus, the last 3 chapters were ripped out and reassembled to make that blatantly obvious.
It may have been planned as a series all along, and I am most definitely not disappointed that there will be more to explore in the universe of this book, but then that simply makes the last three chapters poorly planned and written, doesn't it?
Fforde has a very readable style, when he's not giving up such gems as, "It was a low-lying, highly fenestrated conurbation with whitewashed walls and a roofline bewhiskered with heliostats, chimney pots, and water heaters." His saving grace is that he doesn't write sentences like that as if he's overly pleased with himself for doing so. It's done more with a sense of irony... or just plain silliness.
Still, a very enjoyable book, and one that reminded me that there are worse things one can do than staying up too late to read a few more pages.
