Fiction Reviews
One Eye Opened in That Other Place
(2024) Jasper Fforde, Hodder & Stoughton, £20, hrdbk, 376pp ISBN 978-1-399-73176-8
This the first book I have read from Jasper Fforde and it leaves me wondering why it has taken me so long to do so. It has a good, well written story and is laced with quiet humour. One cannot help but feel that the title is a play on West Side Story and there are many little genre and other references scattered throughout for those that notice them. But do not worry about such details, the story is inventive and well worth reading.
From Eddie Russett, our lead character, our hero we might say, we learn that 500 years ago there was the ‘Something that Happened’. Nobody knows what it was but afterwards everyone was different. Their body shape was a little different (judging from the occasional glimpses of ancient artefacts left by the Previous), their bodies could recover much more easily from serious accidents, their colour vision was greatly degraded, and they lost all night vision and could only go out in daylight. People’s place in society is determined by which colour they can see, with the main colours tending to define social position and occupation, and within that they are graded by the amount of that colour which they can see. Greys, for example, can discern no colours and are at the bottom of society, and we find from Jane Grey (Eddie’s illegal girlfriend) just how bad that can be. Last names are colour based; Eddie Russett, for example, can see eighty-seven percent red and that is the sole reason his wife Violet, daughter of Prefect deMauve, has (more by threat than negotiation) married him - that much red vision in her child would be very good for the deMauve dynasty, and the deMauves are in the top echelons.
Their world is known as the Colourtocracy and is administered by National Colour in distant Emerald City. Eddie and his father, the local Swatchman, have recently moved to East Carmine, in Red Sector West. Swatchmen are the equivalent of our doctors except that they treat people by showing them cards with the appropriate hue to treat their wounds or diseases; everything in this world is colour-driven! East Carmine, like the rest of their society, is not a happy place; it is almost feudal, with very strict and often pointless rules, and there is much social unfairness. Unfortunately for Eddie, he is rather bright and is taken to challenging the useless people who are in authority purely because of the colour of their vision. He might have only been in East Carmine for a matter of weeks, but he is already a marked man.
On a recent fact-finding foray to the abandoned coastal town of High Saffron, young Courtland Gamboge had failed to make it back and those in power, the deMauves and the Gamboges, had decided to blame this unfortunate happenstance on Eddie and Jane. This was partly because the pair had survived whatever it was that went wrong but mostly because the powerful families simply did not like anyone who questioned their authority, especially young malcontents like Eddie and Jane. The trial would ‘of course’ be fair but the result was already known - Eddie and Jane would be sent to the Green Room. As deaths go, this would not be bad; exposure to a hue of green known as Sweetdream would send them into such rapturous delights that it would overwhelm their bodies and they would expire with the broadest grins imaginable. Their bodies would then be rendered down in the time-honoured manner for the benefit of the townsfolk.
One day, whilst out removing the approaching rhododendrons which constantly threaten the boundaries of East Carmine, Eddie finds himself near the Apocrypha known locally as the Fallen Man. Overnight, some thirteen years ago, a man strapped to a metal chair had apparently plummeted from the sky, which is of course impossible. Everyone knows to keep their distance from such an Apocrypha but Eddie decides it is time to look closer and he discovers that the remains are those of a Previous, known by all to have died out all those hundreds of years ago. Furthermore, bearing a name patch of ‘Hanson, Jacqueline’ on her uniform, she was clearly a woman, despite the chair being marked Martin Baker. And her name is not colour-based.
Eddie can only conclude that, somewhere out there beyond their borders (beyond which they all know there is nothing at all - they are the whole world!), there is Somewhere Else where Someone Else must live. This is forbidden knowledge and it will lead him and Jane on a dangerous path of discovery.
I found the book a delight of inventiveness with a well plotted story that was well worth reading. It is filled with characters one can believe in, some of them good but many coming in various shades of unpleasantness. The structure of their society, awful though it is, rings true, and the thought that has gone into designing a colour-based society, with all its stupidities and useless rules, is obvious and inventive. The tale is told throughout with an element of humour provided by Eddie and is constantly enjoyable to read as detail piles upon detail. One can see many similarities and absurdities between our world and theirs, as I think we are meant to. This is very likely to be my favourite book of the year.
Incidentally, the cover mentions that the book is by the author of Shades of Grey and inside, amongst ‘Also by Jasper Fforde’, it lists the Shades of Grey series, which has only the one entry. This is the second volume in the series, though nowhere does it say so. As Red Side Story works very well as a standalone novel, with no hint that it is part of a series, I am curious as to what might have happened in the earlier story (published 2009), and wonder if there will be more to come?
Peter Tyers
See also Mark's take on Red Side Story.
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