Shades of Grey

A guest blog today:

Now upon reading that title, I bet you thought of either the erotic books or the simply disturbing film. I bet none of you thought of anything else. And you know what? I hate those books - the film too I guess. They have left a mark not only on British culture, but on the minds of anyone who had the curiosity to follow the media’s hype over the damned thing.

Before you ask, no, I have not read them. I guess that may be bad given that I am writing an article criticising them, but the detailed content is not what I want to focus on This book has a mountain-load of critics commenting on how the series is unrealistic and disrespectful in its representation of men, women, relationships and the key word “consent”; but that again is not my focus.

My repugnance towards the book is personal, mostly concerned with the title. Anything that now has “50”, “shades”, or “grey” related to it has a permanent association with this smut. For example, one of my favourite sayings, ‘Black and white and all between are all but shades of grey’ which I think is brilliant visual imagery to demonstrate how everyone is equal and should be treated with respect, is now ruined. If I were to ever again say this, it would be greeted with an awkward silence and a few childish giggles, as instead of thinking about the message of the quote (Is it a quote or a saying?), they’re thinking about a multimillionaire with a whip. Similarly, there is a superb book, based on a similar idea of proving equality set in a dystopian world with a class system ranked and distinguished by colours, called ‘Shades of Grey’. The author is the superb Jasper Fforde, who’s ‘Thursday Next’ series I thoroughly recommend to any English Literature student – it is a very amusing commentary on of classical literature whilst being completely supernatural and unique - check out “The Eyre Affair”. Yet now the title to poor Mr Fforde’s book is often misinterpreted by any book-store browser and rejected – or picked up by someone expecting similar ‘scenes to Fifty, who also reject, though possibly with a greater sense of disappointment.

The title has created a stigma attached to these words which interrupt and ruin the messages of other significant features of our culture That’s why I hate the damned books. The film too.

The Woman Who Died a Lot - Jasper Fforde

Read in the Hodder and Stoughton hardback edition.

This represents a return to fform ffor Fforde, after the disappointing "One of Our Thursdays is Missing". The seventh in the Thursday Next series, eighth if you count "The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco", sees Thursday recovering from injuries sustained in a kidnapping attack, and feeling her age. Offered a post in the Wessex Library Service we spend around 75 pages catching up on life in 1980's Swindon, during which I was a little worried that the inventiveness of earlier books remained missing. But the scene setting is worth the time, because the book kicks in with a puzzling attack on Thursday's family which is clearly the work of Aornis Hades, Thursday's nemisis. From there the action never flags.

The span of the novel plays out over a week in which a lot happens in Thursday's life. God has decided to cut out all the potential confusion about his existence, and make himself apparent to man. Mankind seems to have taken this in his stride, even when God gets a bit truculent and starts smiting some cities out of existence, downtown Swindon being next in line. So there's that to sort out, as well as Thursday's new job in the library service, investigating mysterious attacks on book collections by Goliath, her other nemises, if global corporations can be nemises, and indeed if the plural of nemesis is nemises. Her brother Joffy is now in effect mankind's chief negotiator with God over the difficult "meaning of life" question. Aornis has escaped, and needs tracking down. And the lives of her children get more complicated as the grow up - Friday is due to murder someone at the end of the week, Tuesday (keep up there) is investigating how to deflect God's wrath via an anti-smiting device, and Jenny doesn't exist.

How Fforde keeps all these balls in the air, adding in jokes about Dark Matter (setting up the next book in the series nicely) and a range of wacky ideas about time travel, avatars, parallel worlds (thrown in and lightly thrown away) and of course the Book World, is hard to describe, but he does, masterfully.

The acid test of a good read is if you don't want it to stop. I read this in a couple of days flat, and didn't even notice that it was over 350 pages (just checked) - whereas Wolf Hall (for example) was on a slow countdown. I know that probably makes me a sucker for light comic fantasy (and a good dodo joke) - guilty as charged.

One of our Thursdays is Missing - Jasper Fforde

The law of diminishing returns is setting in for this series. Fforde keeps delivering his linguistic pyrotechnics, clever plot twists, and his imaginative recasting of the world of fiction. And yet I can't deny my interest is waning, and as a result I fear I will end up focussing on minor flaws which in early books in the series - and the seventh is coming out later in the year - were more easily over-looked.

This admittedly jaundiced view is not helped by the choice of the "written" Thursday Next as the main protagonist - the real Thursday Next being missing, as the title suggests. Even writing that, and considering trying to draw a distinction between two different flavours of literary character being used here emphasises just how nonsensical that would be. The power of fiction is such that when we identify with a character, and that character is replaced, even if the replacement is a carbon copy of the original, we feel the loss. In any event the primary Thursday in this novel is not a carbon copy of the original, and we are constantly reminded of the fact - she is a more timid, reserved, version. Because the action of the book takes place almost exclusively within BookWorld, we are deprived of most if not all of the characters that have grown over the series. 

One other gripe - there are some jumps in the narrative, almost as if some paragraphs or pages are missing. One example where a puzzle is set - Thursday has to work it out to escape from an island of fan-fiction - and we are not given the answer. I understand this is because Fforde set his fans a series of puzzles on his website, which is where the answer to this and the other narrative discongruities can be found (such as who gives Thursday her Jurisfiction badge?) In the edition I read there was no signposting of this which meant that the book read as rushed and incomplete. Disappointing, but I don't don't I will be coming back for more with TN7.

P.S. Just one more moan - why the silly book titles? I was going to say puns, but there's no punning going on, just the simple insertion of one word for the original. Doing this to a Jeffrey Archer was bad enough, but One of our Dinosaurs is Missing - really?

First Among Sequels - Jasper Fforde

First Among Sequels is (I think, but I may have lost count) the fifth in the Thursday Next series. Halfway through this novel it would be fair to say I was disappointed. Not a lot had happened, and most of the text was a reiteration of the ideas of the earlier books in the series. While several years have elapsed since Something Rotten, Thursday has acquired several children, and is no longer a literary policewoman, despite all this ostensible change, everything felt very familiar.

Then about halfway the book seemed to wake up, sit upright, and give itself a good shake. In fact Fforde seems to have spotted what was happening himself, because he introduces a couple of very clever ways of stopping lazy reading - that is where the reader doesn't really engage with the text, pays only partial attention, and doesn't mind too much about the detail - like when taking a train ride you have been on many times before you don't look out of the window. Spoiler alert - don't read further if you don't want to know how he does this. The first of these techniques is that one of Thursday's children doesn't exist - she is a mindworm implanted by Aeornis Hades, a mind controlling villain from an earlier book. Thursday is convinced she exists, and when told she doesn't has only moments of lucidity before relapsing into the illusion again. It explains why the child is so under-written, and the reader realises with a jolt that they had not been paying enough attention to realise what had been happening. Later on this lesson is reinforced with a subtle, unflagged and very clever change of narrational point of view. I don't mind admitting it had me tracking back a chapter or so to spot what I had missed at first.

This is confident playful writing by a writer at the top of his game. Fforde creates a deliciously dark villain in Thursday Next 1-4, and although she is killed off "textually" at the end of the novel, as we always knew she must be, I would not be at all surprised to see her return. In reading First Among Sequels I was reminded of some of the better episodes of Doctor Who, where time travelling allows just about anything to happen, including dead characters to reappear. There's a wealth of other really funny and interesting ideas, plus an appearance of one of my favourite characters in literature, to make this a really worthwhile and valueable addition to the series. Fforde is in complete control of his material, despite sometimes juggling with concepts which in lesser hands would be simply silly (e.g. the recipe for unscrambled eggs), but definitely pulls it off.

Something Rotten - Jasper Fforde

Something Rotten is the fourth in Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" series. I am a big fan of Fforde - he has a comic inventiveness mixed with erudition that is rare in today's literature. He is hard to categorise - comic fiction certainly, but that is only the start of it. In Thursday Next he has created an original character that you genuinely care about (if not identify with) and her separation from and eventual reunion with her husband is quite touching. So why was I left a bit underwhelmed at the end of this book?

I am pretty sure it is not because his standards are slipping. There are some negative features of a series of novels that are unavoidable - for example we know the principal character will almost certainly survive, no matter what - in this case a bullet to the head is shrugged off in a couple of chapters - so there is little if any tension about the final outcome. As we know what is going to happen, the only interest rests in how we get there, not where we are going. That's not to say that there aren't challenges ahead for Thursday in the rest of the series I am sure.

I think the heart of the problem is in the way I have been reading these books - that is, altogether, without any significant breaks. Imagine if you read all of the Harry Potter series in one go, not over the ten or so years they were published. The impact would have been completely different. The suspense would be seriously diminished, the changes in style and pace would be much more obvious, plot discrepancies would jump out at you, and the point at which Rowling's editors gave up - at the end of "Prisoner" - would be stark. Even knowing that there were seven books in the series, and that it has a definition conclusion, would make the experience different to reading each as it was published (or in my case joining the party at 4 and working back, hurriedly). That experience would be hard but not impossible to create, but I think explains some of my staleness with Fforde. So the simple prescription is a break from this series - the only remaining question is - Where next?