Shades Of Grey

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.