Sam Downing

If I actually bothered to one day jot down a list of my favourite authors, Jasper Fforde would be somewhere right up the top. The man’s imagination is ridiculous. His wit is crackling. His prose is… er, very good too.

Shades of Grey, the first entry in a new trilogy, is a bit of a departure from Fforde’s previous series, Thursday Next and Nursery Crimes. They were both rampantly silly (and I use the word in the best possible way), and while Shades doesn’t lack any of their inventiveness, something about the tone feels a little more mature. If you can even say that about a book with such a wild premise:

The novel is set in a future where society is divided by colour. Not race – literally colour. Citizens are sorted into classes based on what spectrum they best perceive: examples include the supercilious Yellows,  bossy Greens and unlucky Greys, who can’t perceive much colour at all and lumped at the bottom of the social order. A rigid hierarchy of Prefects and rules forms a society that’s reminiscent of a more colourful, decidedly English version of Airstrip One.

Our hero is 20-year-old Red Eddie Russett – everyone’s surnames are dictacted by their colour – an affable, dopey goody-goody who’s banished to the outer fringes to complete a chair census after he dares to suggest a more efficient method of queueing. (This kind of deadpan silliness is Fforde’s hallmark.) In his new home of East Carmine, Eddie meets Jane, a hot-tempered grey with a retrousse noise who reveals the ugly underbelly of society. She also has him eaten by a giant carnivorous plant, but you’ll have to read the book to find out why.

Shades of Grey is a blast (I’m a Fforde fanboy. Can you tell?), but be warned: the story takes an extremely long time to get started – the first half of the book is devoted mostly to worldbuilding, which is fascinating but occasionally frustrating. And avoid if you’re not a fan of books that are transparently set-up for a sequel, because the ending of Shades will just tick you off.