Shades of Grey isn’t so hard to classify – it falls easily within the Science Fiction/Dystopian tent – but it really is like nothing else you are likely to read in this genre. On his website, Jasper Fforde acknowledges the influence of Nineteen-Eighty Four and Brave New World on this novel, but its tone and particular style of post-apocalyptic pessimism is entirely different. On its surface Shades of Grey seems lighter, gentler, its setting characterised by the parochialism of a slightly twee English village where everyone knows each other too well and petty politics are bound to be played. When the story begins, Eddie Russet and his father, Holden, are taking in local tourist traps as they head to their new home in East Carmine: the Last Rabbit, the Badly Drawn Map and the Oz Memorial. Their journey plays on the stereotype of the boring British. Eddie and his father seem to be experiencing an interminable caravan holiday. But the Oz Memorial is, in fact, the remains of a statue of the characters from The Wizard of Oz. What is being memorialised, however, is a mystery. The people of Chromatacia, the name of the Collective of which East Carmine is merely a border town, have no knowledge of what the Memorial actually represents; a clue, if we needed one that we are not in Kansas anymore.

If you’ve read Jasper Fforde before, you may expect this kind of satire, which explains why the book has also been compared to Douglas Adams’ work. Fforde’s world building and sense for the absurd is equal to Adams. His ability to transform the quotidian aspects of British culture into something novel makes for delightful jibes. The popular myth of swan attacks, for instance – that they can break your arm – is exaggerated by Fforde until swans are mythic creatures bent on attacking and killing the unwary. Swan attacks and lightning strikes are humorously disproportionate fears in Chromotacia, a world in which the outside world is a mystery and the unknown is to be feared. People are largely prevented from moving about and so have little to no understanding of the real dangers past the village’s Outer Markers. Identities are linked to one’s postcode and postcodes do not change. They are recorded on one’s spoon. Thanks to a crazy law handed down by Munsell, a kind of prophet who has had an Epiphany centuries before, the production of new spoons is outlawed. Munsell wrote a series of rule books now strictly adhered to because it helps prevent change, so the society of the Collective labours under a whole slew of ridiculous laws which must either be accommodated or gotten around with ‘loopholes’. What spoons that remain from the Previous – the mysterious people who lived and built the world centuries before – are family heirlooms and represent identity. Postcodes are engraved upon spoons just as they are scarred into the body of the Collective members. And while Munsell’s rules determine the conservative tenor of village life they also define the limits of civilisation and, conversely, its enemies. ‘Riffraff’, an underclass of people living outside the Collective, have officially been classified as vermin.

For there is a darker side to Chromatacia, a society in which an individual’s status is determined by their ability to see the colour spectrum. At the age of twenty all members of the Collective are given a test which lasts approximately twenty minutes. The Ishahara determines their place in the Chromatic Hierarchy. It cannot be retaken and its results cannot be appealed. Greys like Jane – those who can’t see colour – are the exploited underclass. Those who see shades of purple are at the top of this class system, while other chromatics – those who see shades of the three primary colours of light – form the Chromatocracy. Eddie Russet sees red hues. Courtland Gamboge has a strong Yellow perception, while Violet deMauve comes from a powerful Purple family. Eddie’s high colour score will make him a valuable marriage asset to augment the deMauve’s colour perception into the future. Social positions tend to be allocated according to this system, including those who achieve Prefect status, which confers authority within the community.

Despite its apparent provincialism, the core of the novel is as horrific and dark as any Dystopian world you may encounter elsewhere. The way Fforde combines the elements of his world – his setting, his characters, the novel’s satirical quips, his vision of the future and of human nature – shouldn’t be possible, but somehow Fforde achieves the impossible. This is an accomplished book.

However, had you asked me to talk about Shades of Grey not so long ago, I may have given you a different assessment. I came to Shades of Grey fourteen years ago having already fallen in love with the Thursday Next and Nursery Crime novels. I read Shades of Grey when it was first published, and I only reread it as a preliminary to tackling Fforde’s second novel in this series, Red Side Story. Red Side Story was published this year, fourteen years after Shades of Grey first appeared. At that time Fforde promised that Shades of Grey was the first of a three book series. Reading around internet forums, I see some fans were decidedly impatient with the publication delay, with comparisons being made with George R.R. Martin, whose completion of The Song of Ice and Fire seems to be held in eternal stasis.

I long considered Shades of Grey the least of Fforde’s oeuvre. I have wondered after I reread it why this had been so. Personal commitments and a higher workload fourteen years ago may have been a factor. It’s a novel that rewards careful reading and distractions would be an impediment to enjoying this book. But there are also aspects of the world-building which may have been a barrier. It is possible to understand the society of the novel, the way its people think and what motivates them, but I think to truly appreciate the novel a reader has to get over the fact that some of the mechanics of the story will never be truly comprehensible. A lot of this is to do with Fforde’s conception of colour. Apropos to this point is Fforde’s conception of colour, as stated on his website, in which he argues that colour is not real, but merely a construct of perception:

There is actually no colour in the real world - it is an abstract construction that belongs only in the mind. It is a sensation, like the brush of a pine cone or the smell of bacon. I like this concept a lot. A glorious deep red has no meaning outside our perception of it. Taking this idea in hand, there is little in the real world that we can sense that is ever actually what we think it is - it is our strict interpretation of our external world.

Why the realities of colour in this world should have bothered me is a mystery now. It seems like pedantry. After all, I readily accepted the premise that the fictional world of books could be literally entered into in the Thursday Next series. But the colour system seems more scientific, and maybe this is why. Others have expressed a similar feeling on Goodreads. They wanted to understand it on some scientific level.

It seems evident that something in the past, possibly during an unexplained event known as the Something that Happened, has caused what we presume to be a mass case of colour blindness in the people of Chromotacia. Fforde’s use of this for satirical purposes seems evident – that hierarchies of our society are arbitrary at their core, and may make no sense if you actually think about them. But there is more to the mechanics of this conceit which readers will struggle with. While natural colours cannot be seen by a vast proportion of the population, ‘synthetic’ colour can. Coloured objects are sought by toshing parties – groups organised to look for colour scrap – in towns that have succumbed to the ‘Mildew’, a disease said to be plaguing this world. Coloured objects are sorted and then processed to extract their colours. Towns on the grid – East Carmine hopes to be put on the grid – enjoy artificialy coloured communities that all can enjoy. Colour Gardens are a popular feature of towns on the grid, for example, which are colourised by pipes pumping synthetic pigment extracted from the scrap of the old world. How real and synthetic colour might work differently in our perception is hard to imagine, although Fforde has a stab at explaining it on his website:

So what then is the problem with the residents of Chromatacia? Well, since the appreciation of full colour is there, their eyes must be functioning perfectly, even without the ability to see low light. The issue is perhaps not about how we receive the outside world, but how we perceive it. In reality, the eyes don't ‘see’ at all - the brain does. And if there is something screwy going on here, it’s within the visual cortex - the area of the brain that processes images and makes sense of the bouncing photons that give us our view of the world. Blindness, in fact, can be unrelated to the eyes - it is possible for the eyes to be fully functioning yet the brain unable to process the information - what is known as ‘cortical blindness’. If you want me to coin a phrase here, the Residents of East Carmine could be described as suffering from 'Selective Cortical Chromatic Response Syndrome'.

If this doesn’t help you imagine or understand the difference between natural and synthetic (or Universal) colour – I confess that I do not – I think it is more profitable to wonder at Fforde’s world and enjoy his unfolding story. Eddie’s father, Holden, is the new Swatchman for East Carmine and Eddie has been sent there also as punishment (he has been ordered to conduct a chair census) for a prank and for new ideas about queueing he cannot leave alone. Swatchmen use colour swatches of special hues to help cure people of ailments (You can view the key swatches used in the book on Fforde’s website by clicking here). Holding up an appropriate swatch to the eye of a patient can bring relief or even cure them. Conversely, in the wrong hands, some swatch hues can be used to do harm. The problem for Eddie is that his father’s predecessor may have been murdered, and Eddie wonders what this might mean for his father.

The book also rewards careful reading. As readers, we are on a journey to understand this world, not just for its colour mechanics, but what has happened and what is driving it. Eddie, as the narrator, does not always explain everything we see and so we rely on context to understand. There is also another aspect to this: Eddie and the people of the Collective don’t know everything. The ‘Something that Happened’ is a catastrophic event that changed society sometime in the past. But a series of Leapbacks – the destruction of old technologies forbidden under the tenets of Munsell – has left the communities more isolated and conservative, and deliberate de-Facting, the destruction of knowledge, has left them more ignorant. As readers, we pick up clues. The name of the tavern, ‘The Fallen Man’, sounds like a Biblical allusion. But we learn it is named after a man who is believed to have fallen from the sky sometime in the past. His remains sit on the boundaries of the town, still in his aluminium chair. Like the pilot from the Lord of the Flies, he appears to have ejected from a plane. There is also a large flat-decked ship off the coast of High Saffron where Eddie leads an expedition to look for new sources of colour scrap. The ship is so large it has changed the dynamics of the bay and the gap between the ship and land has silted in. It seems to be an aircraft carrier. Also, before embarking on the expedition Eddie is warned not to keep any metal unusually warm to the touch, suggesting a problem with radioactive fallout. The presence of megafauna and aggressive trees implies a world in which the genetic makeup of people, animals and plants have been altered. Pieced together, this is a world that appears to have suffered a nuclear catastrophe hundreds of years before. There is a series of clues throughout the novel that help to work out approximately when this was, but I’ll leave that to readers to follow.

I found this to be a fairly unique world when I first read the novel fourteen years ago, and while I enjoyed it, aspects of the world building were hard to grasp. That remains the case, although I feel now that demanding a literal understanding of any of Fforde’s fiction is a fool’s errand. If you are the kind of reader who needs to pin the author down to a rational explanation of everything in the story, then Fforde is not for you. But there is something special about this book. It draws you in not just through the amazing concept of colour as a basis for social hierarchy and organisation, but the story is also compelling. The relationship between Eddie and a grey girl, Jane, with a particularly retrousse nose, is entertaining. Eddie seems hapless in her presence, particularly since she seems happy at the thought that she might kill him. And the story is propelled by a series of mysteries around the presumed murder of the former swatchman, the amusing marital machinations of various families who try to ensure their progeny will climb the chromatic scale, and the dark secrets that lie at the heart of what the Collective is really about: how the world really works. After I first read the book I heard others say they thought it was Fforde’s best book and I wondered what they were seeing that I wasn’t. It’s as though I had suffered some kind of chromatic deficiency, myself. Reading it again, I found my eyes opened, like Jane Grey’s eyes in a particularly crucial moment in the novel, and I saw what they were seeing. At least, I think I do!