The year in books #3: Shades of Grey

I have a philosophy about book reviews; I try to expose myself to the bare minimum of information about the book required to decide that I want to read it. If I'm completely uninterested in a book's premise, I may read an entire in-depth review on the off chance that learning more might spark my interest. On the other hand, if I see that a book was written by Neil Gaiman, won the Hugo Award, or is Now A Major Motion Picture Starring Nicolas Cage*, I won't even read the back cover. Once I've decided I'm going to read the thing, I want to go in with as virgin a brain as possible.

This preamble is to explain the structure I'm going to try to follow in reviews of fiction from now on. I'll tell you right up top how much I liked the book, and get a bit more detailed about why as the review goes on. I am deathly allergic to spoilers, so I promise never to give away plot points, but there are books (the subject of this post among them) that are much more fun to read if you have exactly zero idea of what's going on when you open them.

So. On to the review. This here is the top part, where I tell you how much I liked the book. Remember back when I promised to do that? Yeah. Good times. Anyway.

Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde, is an amazing tale that I can wholeheartedly and enthusiastically recommend to anyone who likes a good yarn. Its style made me think of The Wizard of Oz or Winnie the Poo as they might have been written in collaboration between Lewis Carrol and George Orwell. It's brilliant, it's laugh-out-loud funny, and it has lovable characters in an intriguing and kooky world. You need to read this book.

It is very difficult to tell much more about Shades of Grey than I have above without spoiling the experience of reading it. In fact, I would like to specifically warn you away from reading the back flap of the book - it gives away things that you really shouldn't know when you start reading. The fun of the book is as much about discovering how its strange world functions as about finding out what happens next in the story. I'll take a shot at explaining it a bit, though, for those of you who might not have decided to go read the book yet.

Shades of Grey takes place far in the future of some world that may very well be our own, or may very well not be. Society and life are entirely centered around two things: colors and Rules. Nearly everyone is limited to seeing only a single color, and the higher on the spectrum your color is, and the more of it you can see, the higher your social status; social ambition largely takes the form of hoping to assemble enough Merits and Positive Feedback to negotiate a marriage into a higher-hued family. Life in this Colourocracy is governed by an encyclopedic collection of wonderfully nonsensical Rules, laid down centuries ago and both infallible and immutable. One of the great delights of the book is that each chapter begins with a Rule, and they are wonderfully silly. My favorites: "All children are to attend school until the age of sixteen or until they have learned everything, whichever be sooner." and: "The cucumber and the tomato are both fruit; the avocado is a nut. To assist with the dietary requirements of vegetarians, on the first Tuesday of the month a chicken is officially a vegetable."

I really can't bring myself to relate any more of this world, and the story is too interwoven with the world to even introduce it without giving away delights you should discover in the pages of the book and not in my blog. Go read this book, you really won't regret it.



*Okay, that last one not so much, though it's at least a good way to recognize a Phillip K. Dick book from a distance. But seriously, why do I keep seeing books that advertise who stars in their own movie adaptations? This is not useful information.