Shades Of Grey

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.