Sam Downing

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again, and only partly because I’m a lazy hack: Jasper Fforde is one of my all-time favourite writers of all time. In my fantasy he wakes up in the morning and spends his sun-dappled days filling a tattered notebook with weird and brilliant ideas, which he’s comes up with because of possible mild insanity.

Fforde’s newest weird and brilliant and mildly insane outing is The Woman Who Died a Lot, which picks up the story of Thursday Next. It’s been a while since Fforde ffans saw his kicking-ass-and-taking-names heroine (she was MIA in the previous instalment. Which was narrated instead by her “fictional” counterpart. Which makes perfect sense if you’ve read the whole series. Honest), but she’s back, badly injured by past misadventures – hobbling around on a walking stick, addicted to painkillers, and forced into semiretirement.

Some of Fforde’s mad-scientist inventions for this book: God is real, and determined to wipe out Thursday’s hometown Swindon by the end of the week unless her genius daughter Tuesday perfects an Anti-Smote Shield; Thursday’s son Friday is destined to commit a murder that will earn him a lifetime prison sentence, unless Thursday can find a way to avert the future; the all-powerful, all-jerks Goliath Corporation is attempting to switch out the real Thursday with synthetic robot clones. Oh, and one of Thursday’s powerful former nemeses (there’s a lot of them) has seemingly returned.

Fforde’s endings are sometimes hastily, unsatisfyingly tied together. But that’s not a problem here! Despite all of Died a Lot‘s spinning storylines the climax is beautifully balanced – especially the resolution of the troubling mindworm Thursday’s been carrying around for the last couple books, which makes her believe she has a third child who doesn’t really exist. (Again: makes perfect sense if you’ve read the whole series.)

Thursday is a great leading lady. Tough and smart and loving and awesome. And the set-up for her next adventure smells terrific. Hurry up and write that, Fforde.

Previously: Book review: One of Our Thursdays is Missing, Jasper Fforde

So I haven’t updated my blog in like forever, but, I have a pretty good excuse: I’ve been off travelling around the States, the UK and Europe (mostly Europe) since December. (The trip was awesome, by the way. LONDON I MISS YOU.) It turns out one can get a lot of reading done when one is travelling, so here it is.

(Incidentally, I didn’t lug all these books around with me; I read them on my iPhone using Stanza, which is a brilliant app. And, since I get asked this a lot, reading on the iPhone screen is generally fine – as long as you spend a bit of time working out your preferred font face, size and spacing before you commence the actual reading.) (more…)

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.