Shades Of Grey
Ratings111
Average rating4.1
fantastic. compelling, original plot, but more importantly, delightfully written. wonderful use of language, description, metaphor. playful and dynamic characters. truly enjoyable.
I was really liking the book but I found it hard to follow the audiobook. I want to contemplate on some of the ideas being presented and the world at large, so I think I will read the actual book one day.
Absolutely fantastic! Incredibly dry humor that is compounded by the absurb societal hierarchies based on the color that one predominantly sees. Best move up spectrum!
Start to finish, you're in awe of the world/society this book is set in and you will be constantly attempting to interpret, decipher and solve the mysterious riddles of this environment.
The characters are a blast! The story is entertaining. I'll be reading the second book of the series.
For those of you who follow along with my book reviews, you might remember that I've sort of been on a string of dark novels. So, when I was looking to pick my next book, I was hoping for something a bit lighter, and also something that wasn't part of a series. I LOVED Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, so I thought this book (Shades of Grey) might be just the ticket.
This book takes place in a dystopian future, after “Something” has happened. Essentially, take your typical sci-fi dystopia, now make it British. And slightly absurd. Everyone's worth and place in society is based on the colors you can see. There is a set of Rules that everyone must follow, even if they make no sense. This is one of those books where you just jump into the middle of the world with our protagonist, and have to piece things together as you go along.
I have to admit, it took me a bit to get into this book. In part, probably, because it was darker and less funny than I was hoping for initially. It is...witty? Clever? Amusing? But it didn't really make me laugh. And it took a while to gather all the breadcrumbs about what is happening in this world and put it together into a coherent story. But I did get there, and by the end I was interested and invested in the characters. If absurdist/witty dystopia sounds like your cup of tea, this is a great book for you. Otherwise, let me STRONGLY recommend the Thursday Next series (first book is The Eyre Affair).
3.5
5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews
Summary
Ever since Something That Happened did away with the Previous, society has been organized on a strict class system based on how much of a color one can see. The Rules are strict - designated attire, specified hobbies and sports, and no complex technology (including, for reasons no one is sure of, manufacture of spoons). When Edward Russet and his father are transferred temporarily to the boondocks, Edward finds there's a lot more going on under the surface than he realized.
Review
Jasper Fforde is a bit of an inconsistent author, and seems to have trouble keeping his series on track. But when he's writing well, he's exceptionally good. Happily this (first of a series) book is one of the exceptional ones. It's an odd world, and he gets away with a lot of handwaving, but it's also intriguing, and he's stocked it with a handful of engaging, interesting characters (along with many more stock figures).
Fforde specializes in the unusual, and sometimes with a tilt toward new adults, and this falls perfectly in line. He deftly introduces a world with rigid, written rules (such as no manufacture of spoons) and a class system based on how much of a color one can see, while also leaving us trying to figure out how the society works and where it came from. It's at once a comedy, a light romance, an adventure, and a biting satire of aspects of contemporary society. It's a weird mix, but I really enjoyed it.
I also plan to go on to the sequels - if there are any. Though this first book was published 15 years ago, confidently listing titles of two sequels, they're only now coming out, with one due this May (Red Side Story rather than the expected Painting by Numbers). I hope they're coming. I didn't read this with sequels in mind (I thought it was a standalone), but maybe I'm in luck.
Many years in the future, Eddie, a Red, lives in a “colortacracy” where he is on the lower end of the caste system, but at least he's above the greys. Your designation is determined by what color you can see, and this has all sorts of implications for what work you can do, who you can court and marry (color theory comes into play here), and how you treat and think about about other colors. Eddie and his father need to visit a town in the fringes for new, temporary assignments. Eddie, who is quite a stickler for the many rules that so strictly guide decorum, learns that the code book and points system get much less care here than in the big city. In fact, he learns many new things.
There's a few initial questions the book explores and since I was quite confused at the beginning, these were my hooks that kept me going. This really is an amazing book, pretty groundbreaking and I really would like to read it with eyes another time since I missed a lot of the humor and intricacies.
If you want a wowzer of a world or a book that says something, I recommend. It has extreme worldbuilding that never felt info dumpy (even though maybe it is). The audiobook is excellent, but I do NOT recommend it if you cannot dedicate 100% of your attention to the story. The worldbuilding is just too detailed.
What a bittersweet ending!! But the story was delightful and the world building was so interesting. I need a second novel so we can see what Eddie and Jane get up to. Equal color for all! Dismantle the head office and the collective! Let the spoon production flow freely!
This book was by turns funny and frustrating, lighthearted and at times a little horrifying. It is by far the most creative and whimsical dystopian I have ever read.
What initially reads as surreal nonsense, gradually develops into an intriguing story. Looking forward to the next in the series...
When I first started reading this book, I realized that I forgot how hard it is to wrap my brain around the worlds that Jasper Fforde creates in his books. But once I understood Chromatacia, I was mesmerized again. Fforde crafts amazingly logical yet absurd societies. I really appreciate how everything fits together. And I was intrigued by this chromatic society and gripped by the characters and story. This is supposed to be a trilogy, although the other two books never came out. I hope they do one day, as I am definitely wanting more.
I'm seriously impressed by this book. The truly bizarre and unique scenario is elaborated in considerable detail with endless creative imagination; the plot has many twists and turns. I come out of it feeling that it easily deserves five stars.
However, in practice, I rarely reread it, and I have difficulty in persuading myself to reread it, because the scenario is dystopian, and I don't like reading about dystopias. So my four-star rating is a compromise between my perception of five-star excellence and my three-star infrequency of rereading.
As far as I know, there's no connection between this and Jasper Fforde's earlier books.
Characterization is mostly lightweight but at least varied. The first-person protagonist, Eddie Russett, is on the whole a fairly standard Decent Chap, who finds in the course of the story that he has to re-evaluate much of what he thought he knew about his world.
The bad-tempered and dangerous Jane Grey is the most interesting character, and this book doesn't completely reveal what she's up to: a couple of sequels are promised, and I suppose she hasn't finished surprising us yet.
The story gradually reveals some of the secrets behind the scenario, but plenty of important secrets remain hidden, and without more information I still can't tell whether this is fantasy or science fiction; although it's clearly set centuries in our future. It's a serious story in which seriously bad things are happening, and yet there are details that are often deliberately amusing. So it could perhaps be described as a comedy-thriller.
The scenario involves a society operating by strict and detailed Rules. For example:
“The ‘Standard Variable' procedure was in place to allow very minor changes of the Rules. The most obvious example was the ‘Children under ten are to be given a glass of milk and a smack at 11 a.m.' rule, which for almost two hundred years was interpreted as the literal Word of Munsell, and children were given the glass of milk, and then clipped around the ear. It took a brave Prefect to point out – tactfully, of course – that this was doubtless a spelling mistake, and should have read ‘snack'. It was blamed on a scribe's error rather than Rule Fallibility and the Variable was adopted.”
This Rules-driven society has a class system based on colour perception. The people all have defective colour vision, often able to see only one colour; and some colours carry higher status than others. People with little or no colour perception (Greys) are at the bottom of the heap, treated with disdain and required to work as manual labourers or servants.
If you think you understand the scenario from this brief description, you're wrong. It may sound a bit weird, but trust me, it's much weirder than that.
Considering that this is the first part of a trilogy, it has a fairly satisfactory ending: we clearly come to the end of the first part of the story. But I'd really like to know what happens next.
A strange, semi-compelling near-ish future fantasy. This is one of those concept books where the worldbuilding is the main selling point, often at the expense of character and plot. Characters in this are fine, if a little one-dimensional, and - unfortunately - the plot is standard and extremely slow-moving. We don't even get to the good stuff until the very last couple chapters!
It's been about 500 years since the Something That Happened, and humans with tiny, tiny pupils are (1) unable to see the full spectrum of color, and (2) really, really British. Like old school, tweedy, uptight, 1950s Englishy British. Like, the sort of stuff Monty Python would regularly poke fun at. Like that one really excellent episode of Doctor Who (sorry, gratuitous Who reference, latest obsession). Anyway, because of facts (1) and (2), the entire society is an extremely classist hierarchy, where Purples reign supreme (heh), and no one wants to be a low-class worker Grey. Where you fall on the colo(u)r spectrum all depends on what you can naturally perceive on the color spectrum - Purples see only purple. And that depends on genetics - which basically means everyone's thinking about breeding, all the time.
Our hero is Edward Russett, a mid-level Red who is basically the Standard British Dystopian Drone. A tiny little bit of him questions the system, but mostly he's fussy about his small-scale ambitions and fastidious in following the Rules. Naturally, he'll need a Freeing Femme Fatale to, uh, free him from this - and that would be Jane, a Grey with a cute nose.
THE NOSE THING. Pause for the NOSE THING. Ugh, I found this so tedious and sexist and stupid. Especially because it's meant to be precious and twee and cute and British. But every character - EVERY CHARACTER - must, at some point, comment on Jane's cute nose. The only reason Jane even enters the story is because Edward notes, again and again, how cute her nose is and, gosh, how he'd like to talk to her more. Aaarghh, I really couldn't stand this.
Indeed, a tangent to my tangent. It's still so depressing that speculative fiction, especially when it considers itself imaginative (such as this), is capable of building elaborate future worlds with elaborate social structures, but still can't envision, say, a female protagonist. Or just a female character that does something beyond liberate the male character's heroic protagonistness, and isn't described primarily by her sexy allure. Suffice it to say, this book doesn't pass the Bechdel Test.
Back to the book. So it's fine and tries very hard to be funny in a precious way, and generally succeeds. But unfortunately no real plot happens until the last few chapters of the book; we're meant to then follow Eddie Russett's adventures into books 2 and 3. I'm not sure if I will. Cliffhanger endings are fine if sufficient urgency has been built up; then you're happy to swing from cliffhanger to cliffhanger like a monkey through the branches (I'm thinking of something like Battlestar Galactica, whose first season was basically a clifferhanger bonanza). Shades of Grey, instead, ends with a sort of, “Oh, okay - something fishy is going on here.” Not really enough to propel me forward, and - in a standard mystery - something that should happen much sooner in the book.
God. It was difficult to read in the beginning because the set up of the story world wasn't clear, and I got the names of the characters mixed up along the way. Other than that it was an exciting read, although the pace of the book was slow. The pay-off wasn't that fantastic but it was an amazing read because of the imagination and thought put into it.
Fforde is back! Captivating, thought-provoking, sense, sense-of-wonder material.
