Red Side Story (Shades of Grey)

In Red Side Story, the second book in the Shades of Grey series, Welsh author Jasper Fforde returns the reader to East Carmine, somewhere on the island that used to be Britain, sometime in the far dystopian future when all fauna including humans are bar-coded, people live in a chromatic hierarchy, graded according to colour perception, have no night vision, and live by to centuries-old dogma entailing ridiculous rules, often circumvented by shrewd loopholery.

The scarcity of spoons affords them their own postcode and gives the owner the right to procreate, wearing gloves is forbidden, along with the use of acronyms, and enquiry is frowned upon. The quickly-fatal Mildew takes out the old, the broken, the lazy, and the independent thinkers. The technical Leapbacks ensure that much that is useful is also illegal.

Eddie Russett's recent Ishihara test rates him with the highest red perception in the village, which ought to afford him a prestigious position, and sees him, to his dismay, engaged to a pregnant-to-him Violet deMauve, but with a murder trial hanging over him and his true beloved, the seditious Jane Brunswick, (formerly Grey) after their recent expedition to High Saffron, it's a moot point.

Jane, though, is determined to undermine the power of the ruling Collective, with Eddie ever ready to do her bidding. Sent to the ghost town of Crimsonolia to search for spoons, they take the opportunity to do some research and, after narrowly escaping an ambush, are shocked by what they coincidentally learn. "It's not unusual," they are later told, "for residents with an inquisitive mind to achieve a limited degree of unnecessary awareness. Most people are sensible, ignore it, and live on." Not Eddie or Jane!

Surprise testimony at their disciplinary hearing results in an upheaval in the ruling Prefects, and brings the threat of a Supervisory Swatchman who will administer the Mildew when Eddie's father demurs. Things go horribly wrong for the village while a team from East Carmine are away in Vermillion attending the Jollity Fair, and when things get dangerous for the survivors, Jane and Eddie have to think outside the box if they are to survive.

As always, Fforde's plot is highly original, very clever and Douglas-Adams-level imaginative. He is inspired when it comes to hilarious names (people, towns, flora and fauna, technological advances and euphemisms). Readers will recognise in Chromatacia the absurdities of our own bureaucracies, politics and everyday life. Fforde has a finger firmly on society's pulse.

Each chapter is prefaced by an extract from either the Great Munsell's Book of Harmony, or Ted Grey's memoir, Twenty Years among the Chromatacians. There's plenty of wordplay in this wonderful social & political satire, an abundance of laugh-out-loud moments, and caution with liquids whilst reading is advised due to possible ambush by some of the witty dialogue. While the resolution is satisfying, room is left for more of Eddie and Jane: let's hope Fforde doesn't make fans wait another fourteen years for the next entertaining flash of colour.