Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde is a book about a young man in society whose social hierarchy is based on what level of color an individual can see. The society is structured around politeness, non-violence, and the pursuit of gratification by experiencing beautiful things…unless you are a Gray. There are also color based marriages; and fears of swans, lightening, and The Mold. I am not doing a great job of laying out the plot here, but it is a grand adventure about one young man’s deconstruction journey.
Who recommended this book? Ginny Holiday! Ginny and I met at a holiday bazaar where she was selling her art and fiction. I immediately decided we should be friends. Months later we discovered our children went to nature school together and had independently become BF’s. Ginny is a magical artist, writer, and musician. Of course she would recommend one of my favorites!
What did I think of the book? Well. When I first read about the possibility of swan attacks I knew this was going to be right up my alley. Then I opened the book and started reading.
The first chapter of a book teaches the reader what to expect. The first chapter of Gray is a master class in world building. We drop right into this bonkers society with insane rules about dress, conduct, and the availability of spoons. Fforde walks us around a city with the protagonist and his father as they do a quick tourist stop on their way to an outer village.
This walkabout left me in awe of Fforde’s writing skills, but I wasn’t sure I was loving the book for the narrative or the craft. Honestly, it was almost like reading Patrick O’Brian for the first time? I was dropped into a world where I had to learn the culture, the characters, and the lingo really quickly. That said, the author didn’t overwhelm with exposition, but did a true “show not tell”.
By chapter three I was happily engrossed in the wildness of it all.
At its heart, Shades of Grey has a distinct Animal Farm vibe. A supposedly utopian society has a dark underside; the collective is really a front for the powerful to thrive. Fforde uses an absurdist lens to capture the reality of any society that expects mindless obedience and unquestioning loyalty to a system that is in practice illogical and unjust.
While Fforde excels in World Building, he is no slouch with his characters or plotting. The plot itself is fairly simple—Guy tries to win girl while having an ideological mega-shift, and surviving in an unchangeable world that he desires to change—but it is sprinkled with a thousand delicious complexities set up by the masterful world building.
The system of rules—created hundreds of years before—are so random and illogical that Fforde has a build it narrative bag of holding to pull plot devices from, yet nothing feels contrived. Everything is seeded beautifully in this novel, so when it does come back around in a meaningful moment it feels like another layer of narrative rather than a twist. That said, the author floods the book with so many Chekov-esqu delights that I spent very little time putting pieces together ahead of time.
Characters. There wasn’t a single uninteresting character in this book. My go to question is “would I read a spin-off about this character?” And the answer was yes almost across the board. The “good” characters were pleasantly flawed and nuanced enough to feel relatable; the “bad” character’s actions were believabley rooted in the world building; minor characters were living life off the page in a way that made me excited to see them walk by and interact with the others.
It turns out Shades of Grey is the first in a set and I am excited to get the others. I’ve already handed this one off to Violet and haven’t seen her in a couple hours so Fforde is an author who will likely be joining our permanent collection.
Who would I recommend this to? Reader and Writer friends. This doesn’t feel like a casual reader book. It is dense, and the first couple chapters require a lot of schema building, but the payoff is great. I don’t see a lot of crossover however between these readers and the Kristen Hannah readers of the world.
There is very little content that I wouldn’t share with sensitive readers.
Violence- very little. One character does some punching and threatening to kill; a sports game results in injuries but we mostly see the after effects.
Sex-some vague references (but the terms are different), one fade to black scene that is very innocuous, and a couple kisses.
Profanity-maybe two or three times?
All in all, I will be recommending this book to many people in the future; I fully expect most of them to enjoy it.
Writing Prompt: Kara had always believed that the system worked, until…
Mamasquatch the Writer 
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