I am an enormous fan of Jasper Fforde. I have followed him from his first novel, The Eyre Affair, through to his latest, Shades of Grey. This has taken me through five Thursday Next novels, two Nursery Crime novels and now into a third series – actually, I’m not sure of the title of this series. The endpage of the book promised, like James Bond, Brunswick and de Mauve would return in at least two more novels. I was three-quarters through the book when I noticed this and had no idea who these people were. All became clear by the time the book was finished.
When I first discovered Fforde I felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. The humour, ideas and word play reminded me so of a novel I would like to write. I pressed a copy or recommended it to friends and family almost at random. Some like me became dedicated fans. Others not so much, that is to say, not at all. And there seemed to be no pattern to this. People I was sure would like the book were largely indifferent and vice versa. Why this should be I can’t say. But I have a theory.
The Thursday Next books take place in a slightly alternative Britain in the Eighties. The hero, Thursday Next, works for Special Operations 17, and is trying to stop a madman kidnapping major characters from fiction and holding them to ransom. She has a pet dodo and was in her day a major talent in England’s favourite sport, croquet.
The Nursery Crime books take place in what might be called Mother Goose land, except, apart from the fact it is populated by people from Nursery Rhymes, such as our detective hero, Jack Spratt, as well as Humpty Dumpty and the sinister serial killer, the Gingerbread Man (yes, run, run as fast as you can!), it is also a slightly alternative Britain.
Shades of Grey takes place in what seems to be Britain as well, a dystopic future England where something happened and people can only see one colour from the spectrum, and one’s life is determined by which colour and how much you can see. Technology has been largely abandoned for what is now a more rustic existence and life is governed by the rules of the Colourtocracy, all for the good of the Collective.
I say ‘something happened’ because that is as much as an explanation Fforde gives the reader or that the inhabitants of the world are ever given. Which is how Fforde seems to work, creating a world that is only slightly different to ours, although sometimes bizarrely, and never explaining in detail how this world works or why. I think this can be part of his charm, or a cause of frustration, depending how you react to it. That the new world is only slightly different adds to the effect. It’s not much of a theory and probably wouldn’t stand up to any decent scrutiny. It may just be different strokes for different folks, and no more explanation needed.
Mind you, explaining your imagined world in detail may not be the best idea. For further exploration of this topic, watch the Star Wars sexology in the order they were released. The more details and backstory we get in the second trilogy (Ep I, II and III) the less interesting and plausible that universe becomes. On a related yet different topic, Alien is more frightening than Aliens because we never see the whole monster. The original Cape Fear is more frightening than the remake because we see less violence and more is left to our imagination. Ah the power of the imagination. And the courage to let the audience have some.
Fforde dumps the reader into a new world and expects us to catch up. Shades of Grey took me the longest to get into of any of his novels, but once in I was hooked, and to see what happens to his heroes Eddie, from the Red strata of society and Jane from the Grey (Fforde still has his linguistic fun even in a colour-driven world). I expect, like with the other series, more of the world will be revealed in future instalments, but also that much will not be revealed. That’s fine – there’s a lot about my world I don’t get, so why should I expect completeness anywhere else?
If you like Jasper Fforde, you will like this book. If you don’t, give it a go – it’s a new direction for him in many ways, with, without giving too much away, a darker undertone than his previous work. And see if you can, as I cannot, hear Fforde’s name in your head without sounding the ‘f’ twice.
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