The Designer’s Drugs

Medium: Literature
Stimuli: Jasper Fforde – Shades of Grey
Anno: 2009

Being that Jasper Fforde is often caricatured as a punny rewriter of nursery rhymes, I expected Shades of Grey to be more of a comedy. It isn’t. The world described in this book combines the totalitarianism of 1984 or Brave New World with a color-based caste system reminiscent of Edwin Abbot’s Flatland. What results is a post-apocalyptic society where the population is kept stupid and each person is reminded at all times of its place. The people in this world, by and large, are miserable and horrible.

The moments of comedy are rare. One arrives in the misinterpretation of a board game as a cultural artifact, which is a slow burn joke that pays off when the reader finally gets what’s being talked about. A running gag involves an Apocryphal Man, who believes himself invisible due to the rest of the populace being forbidden to acknowledge his existence. And what would a book about chromatic fascism be without a reference to Mr. Simply Red?

Almost everything else is whimsically bleak. Eddie Russett begins the narrative waiting to be digested by a carnivorous plant and recounts the past few days in the meantime. Eddie is an untested young Red, which means that he comes from a family that can see red. In this world, one’s social standing is determined entirely by how much color one can see, and hierarchy and stereotypes have developed around the colors. Ultraviolets are the Brahmans, whereas colorblind Greys are classified Untouchable. Eddie begins the story obsessed with marrying into an old-color Red family, but his meeting with a violent and surly Grey girl sets him down the path to scandal and dangerous enlightenment.

It’s explained later just why the naïve and unduly helpful Eddie Russett and his color physician father really were sent to the outskirt town of East Carmine, but at first it seems an easy fortune that the town where Eddie must serve his community service is in need of a town doctor. Much of what follows in East Carmine involves showing the quirks of the eccentric and/or awful citizenry and the secrets behind the society at large. At the hands of Jane the Grey, Eddie’s resigned acceptance of his heartless, mechanical society gives way to a state of perilous possibility.

What’s best about Shades of Grey is how the world grows and unfolds, almost always against plan. Many of the prominent citizens of East Carmine are little more than stupid beasts of burden hellbent on repressing and being repressed. Yet this makes the excitement of discovering what’s really going on even greater, resulting in a world far more colorful than anyone within can see.