There's a schism in the world of world-building. It's quite stark, really and the extremes are so distant as to be quite literally separate worlds. To cross from one extreme to the other is not unheard of, but it clearly requires a significant level of writerly skill. To combine them is almost unheard of.
Jasper Fforde's work — in his Thursday Next and Nursery Crime novels — is set in a world that is clearly not ours and has no historical connection to ours. It's a second world fantasy, where the rules of reality are different, even if the people are not. There's no chain of historical events that leads from where we are, or were, to the events in 'The Eyre Affair.' These books are delightful, inventive japes that speak to us, but not directly about us. So when you read 'Shades of Grey' and encounter a world nearly as weird as anything in his other novels, you might be tempted to think it is another second world fantasy. It certainly reads like one, to begin with. But Fforde is up to something very new here. 'Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron' is a dystopian detective story, in which the detectives are ordinary citizens of an extraordinary world, trying to discern just how things got from where, as it happens, we are now, to where they are — in Colormatica, which is, we learn, a "Colortocracy."
If you're scratching your head now, wondering what a "Colortocracy" is, wait until you start reading the novel. Fforde's newest novel preserves the pleasures of his previous work, but adds depths that cast shadows back into this world and our lives. He's written a gritty dystopia that is also quite literally a colorful, silly and fun fantasy. But it's a fantasy that is unfolds our world with barbed humor, some amazing world-building and utterly charming characters. Plus, it makes you wish for the impossible. It's a superb and amazing reading experience.
The story begins when Eddie Russet, who lives in a world where classes are segregated by color perception, is sent from his home in Jade-under-Lime to the boondocks village of East Carmine to do penance. He's tasked with conducting a Chair census. He's a Red with a good family decent prospects, until he falls for the girl with the retroussé nose, after which, he starts to tumble down into a rabbit hole that will, it seems lead back to our world. It's a reverse epic of discovery for Eddie and the reader both.
Jasper Fforde's 'Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron ' has it both ways at once. It's a silly and fun voyage of discovery, in which the nature of the world is the plot driver. Eddie accepts his almost beyond-bizarre world, and so, in turn do we. It's reads as fancifully as the world of Thursday Next, but there is clearly a level of grit and dirt and hardscrabble reality underlying all the wonder, and that's what both Eddie and the reader discover as the book unfolds. 'Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron ' is a classic journey of discovery that is also like no other of its kind, due to Jasper Fforde's incredible wit and imagination.
While 'Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron' is really quite weird in setting and society, Fforde has the writerly skills to make his characters as familiar and likeable as anyone you might meet on the way to or at the grocery store. Eddie, his father, Jane, the sleazy Tommo, even the treacherous Courtland, are all "just chaps," regular guys in their own oh-so-weird and nearly inscrutable world, Fforde breathes life and joy into reading about every character so every page and every step towards understanding, such as it is, is joyful for the reader.
Fforde's sense of humor and his imaginative satiric skills are in their highest form here. 'Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron' is every bit as goofily enjoyable as everything else he's written, but there's a level of world-building under the goofiness that is startlingly impressive. This is not simply fantasy; this is science fiction so well conceived that it doesn't read like science fiction, not at first. But as the novel progresses, readers will take note that Fforde loves his mystery fiction. The mystery here is the science fiction world-building beneath the apparent fantasy, and the resolution is impressive. Yes, 'Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron' is the first in a series, and readers will anticipate the coming novels. This is a story of revolution and reconciliation, not just within the novel itself, but as well, within the literary world it was born in.
03-18-10: Commentary : Stephen Kessler Follows 'The Mental Traveler' : Bad Trips and Good Reading
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Alta Ifland and Stephen Kessler : "I had to do it; it was a way of both coming to terms with the experience, of documenting the experience, of commemorating it..."
03-17-10: Commentary : Ted Chiang Charts 'The Lifecycle of Software Objects' : Joshua Blue, Digital Chimps and Lives in Flux
03-15-10: Commentary : Elif Shafak Reveals 'The Forty Rules of Love' : Intimacy and Centuries
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Elif Shafak : "I know that culture that exists in my country, that is carried on by women, generations of women."
03-12-10: Commentary : Karl Marlantes Scales the 'Matterhorn' : World-Building in the Past
03-09-10: Commentary : Paul McHugh Meets 'Deadlines' : Murdering the California Coast
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Paul McHugh : "..the strengths of good writing go all the way, across all the genres..."
03-08-10: Commentary : Joe Hill Grows 'Horns' : Devil and Detail
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Joe Hill : "Eventually, the wicked and the unworthy will get their just desserts on the business end of the Devil's pitchfork."
03-05-10: Commentary : Henry Porter Calls 'The Bell Ringers' : It Takes The Village
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Four Books With Alan Cheuse : Thrillers! : Henry Porter, The Bell Ringers; Keith Thomson, Once a Spy; Jo Nesbo, The Devil's Star; Hennig Mankel, The Man From Beijing
03-04-10: Commentary : Jo NesbØ Earns 'The Devil's Star' : Rewind
03-01-10: Commentary : Adam Haslett Invests With 'Union Atlantic' : Abstract Power Abstracts Absolutely
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview With Adam Haslett : "With her, and with each character, how does the rhythm create a kind of musical argument?"
02-26-10: Commentary : Dan Simmons Heads for the 'Black Hills' : Unstuck in Life
02-23-10: Commentary : Adam Haslett Knows 'You Are No Stranger Here' : Stories from Strangers' Shoes
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Jedediah Berry Interviewed at SF in SF, February 13, 2010 : "...being at Small Beer has actually introduced whole worlds to me ..."
02-22-10: Commentary : Graeme Gibson's 'The Bedside Book of Birds' and 'The Bedside Book of Beasts' : A Feast for Your Mind, Your Eyes and Your Mind's Eye
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2009 Interview with Graeme Gibson : "Our common humanity, our common culture, will help make the connections."
02-19-10: Commentary : Ralph Waldo Ellison 'Three Days Before the Shooting ...' : One Book, Many Stories
Agony Column Podcast News Report : John Callahan and Adam Bradley and 'Three Days before the Shooting' : "I've moved through the phases of my own life, and I find those phases mirrored in the characters of this novel." — John Callahan "...capable of brilliance, eloquence and power; that's how I understand the second novel, as we see it in Three Days Before the Shooting, and that's certainly how I understand, and I think how Ellison understood, America." — Adam Bradley
02-18-10: Commentary : George Mann Scares Up 'The Ghosts of Manhattan' : Hard Core Pulp Action
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Speaking Frankly With Thomas Frank : From Tea to Shining Tea : "When I think about what I'm saying, it's so depressing..."
02-17-10: Commentary : Thomas More, Clarence Miller and 'Utopia' : Politics, Satire, Fantasy
02-15-10: Commentary : 'Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded' by John Scalzi : A Decade of Whatever
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni : "I have to work through the novel and then it comes to me, how it's going to end."
02-12-10: Commentary : Stephanie Merritt Becomes S. J. Parris : 'Heresy'
02-11-10: Commentary : Max Watman 'Chasing the White Dog' : Home-Made Hooch and Rebellion
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview With Sam Farr : : "The money came from Washington, but the uses for that money came from the local community."
02-10-10: Commentary : Anne Lamott Spots 'Imperfect Birds' : The Ties That Unbind
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Speaking Frankly: Thomas Frank on Re-Populism and Re-Launching The Baffler : "I have never seen 'populist backlash in a headline before."
02-09-10: Commentary : Douglas Clegg Returns to 'Neverland' : Is 1980's Horror Returning from the Grave?
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2009 Interview with David Drake, Part 2 / Complete : "I didn't have governor ... that is ... anything, endgame, was me killing somebody.""
02-08-10: Commentary : David Louis Edelman Completes Jump 225 : 'Geosynchron'
