Alexandra Pierce Reviews Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde

Red Side Story, Jasper Fforde (Hodder & Stough­ton 978-1444763669, £17.99, 384pp, hc) February 2024. (Soho Press 978-1-64129-628-1, $29.95, 456pp, hc) May 2024.

When Jasper Fforde did clever things in The Eyre Affair (2001), I was one of many people who fell in love with this funny, bizarre, slightly-askew-to-reality world. Fforde was writing humorous fantasy that com­mented on and skewered the real one. It sounded superficially like the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett, but stayed much closer to the ‘real’; he was able to do clever things with nearly real history, but his commentary was also a bit more obvious. I read several of the sequels, and his other novels; in particular, I was intrigued by Shades of Grey (2009). Its location was also ‘‘take the real world but turn it 30 degrees anticlockwise’’: people can only see one natural color, with varying degrees of saturation; the color you can see determines your class, marriage prospects, employment and everything else; swans or carnivorous trees might kill you; everything and every person has a barcode, and every single part of your life is covered by 500-year-old rules, which are ruthlessly enforced.

Red Side Story is the long-awaited sequel to Shades of Grey. It picks up just weeks after the con­clusion of the first book, so while Fforde provides significant backstory, it’s best read after the first.

Like Shades of Grey, the first page of Red Side Story tells the reader what’s to come. The narrator, Eddie Russett (also the narrator of the first book), is about to be married to Violet deMauve; he will then discover that he’s a subject with a code rather than a name; he will have several name changes (which denote significant change in his society); and he will eventually leave the Colourtocracy. Along the way there will be several near-death experiences – and throughout it all he will be with Jane, the woman he fell in love with in Shades of Grey. The choice to outline the entire plot on the first page is an interesting one. In their show Douglas, Hannah Gadsby claims that outlining the show is done to manage audience expectations. Fforde’s intention is less transparent. It does create a different sort of anticipation, compared with having no idea of the plot: The question is about how the characters get to those moments, rather than what will hap­pen. Whether this works as a device will be very reader-specific.

Fforde’s social commentary covers a lot of ground. Which color you can see is clearly a ridicu­lous way to determine your place in society (as are gender, race, dis/ability, etc.). Being barcoded and observed by drones is an affront to notions of pri­vacy (this doesn’t even need translation). The Rules of Munsell are often arbitrary; mistakes cannot be rectified, creating serious problems – no mention of spoons means no new spoons can be made; the zealotry of the authorities in enforcing the rules is extreme (reflecting all tyrannies, anywhere, any time). There is, though, a fine line between clever social commentary and heavy-handed didacti­cism, and Fforde occasionally steps over into the latter: Eddie’s increasing questioning of the status quo results in some turgid reflection that is both repetitive and a barrier to what should have been a faster-paced novel.

Further problems result from some convenient hand-wavey-ness. In particular, that new skills can be acquired simply by viewing a particular color is perhaps no more nonsensical than the idea that illnesses can be imparted, or healing hastened, by the same method. It does, though, mean that characters can overcome obstacles relatively easily, without having to do any tedious practise – and without the need to introduce new characters. So, too, with the presence of Baxter, who doesn’t of­ficially exist and whose job is to observe and study Eddie’s society: having lived for several centuries, he is able to offer answers and explanations once Eddie is prepared to break taboo by speaking to him. This does help with the pacing – no need to laboriously figure something out – but also feels like a too-convenient shortcut.

There is no denying the inventiveness of Jasper Fforde’s worldbuilding, nor his ability to under­stand human nature; the idea that loopholery would be an entirely accepted part of social machinery is testament to that. That Eddie’s so­ciety is a long-running experiment is horrific and believable. Yet Eddie himself never particularly shines. He’s an Arthur Dent, finding himself in a society-changing position largely through hap­penstance; this isn’t automatically a problem (see: Arthur Dent), but he’s not particularly winsome, which is a problem. His girlfriend Jane is a much more fierce revolutionary, with a great deal more motivation for wanting change, given her place at the bottom of the hierarchy.

There’s apparently a third book in the works, but given the thirteen years of waiting for Red Side Story, I’m not holding my breath. I will probably read it when it’s published, but mainly for the sake of completion.

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This review and more like it in the February 2024 issue of Locus.

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