Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron is the first novel in the Shades of Grey series by Jasper Fforde.
Finished on: 11.4.2024
[Here’s my first review.]

Plot:
In Chromatacia, everyone is ruled by Colourtocracy as outlined by Our Munsell: People are classified by the colours they are able to see. Greys are the lowest of the low, not being able to see any natural colours. The highest up the ladder are the Purples. The complete societal order is based on one book that is followed to the letter.
Eddie Russett is a Red. He is sent to a remote city as a punishment to conduct a chair census. When he meets the Grey Jane, his natural curiousity gets amplified by her defiance and he starts to question the status quo more and more.

The sequel to Shades of Grey has been a long time coming but it is finally here. Since it has been almost 15 years, I thought that before delving into the sequel, I’d give this one a re-read, although Shades of Grey is probably my least favorite of the Jasper Fforde novels. Given how much I love his writing, this is not saying much. It’s definitely still an enjoyable book on re-reading it, but it retained its low ranking in the Fforde bibliography for me.

Shades of Grey is completely unlike any dystopian world in many ways. The ideas surrounding how colors work in Chromatacia, are, in finest Fforde fashion, at once completely absurd and totally stringent, thought through in all its implications. The resulting hierarchy and the plot prompted by said hierarchies are more standard dystopian fare, I’d say.

Since the most interesting thing about the book is its world-building, it is probably no surprise that it spends most of its time exploring that. So it takes almost until the very end until the plot really gets going, making it, on the one hand, a bit of a tough read, and on the other, particularly evil that it took 15 years until the sequel came out. (Btw, in The Great Troll War where Fforde gives himself a cameo, he pokes fun at himself for the long delay. Given that there were seven years between The Great Troll War and its predecessor, too, makes it doubly delicious.)

It also takes a very dark turn at the end. I mean, the heaviness and cruelty is always present in Chromatacia, but the humorous tone of the novel makes it feel light regardless – until the end when Fforde allows the implications of a totalitarian regime to show themselves in their full harshness.

In any case, I am glad I re-read it as my memory of what exactly happened in the book was almost completely gone. Now I am ready to finally continue the story.

Summarizing: not my favorite, but by no means bad.