electronic resource
English language
Published Nov. 15, 2009 by Penguin USA, Inc..
An astonishing, hotly anticipated new novel from the great literary fantasist and creator of Thursday Next, Jasper Fforde. As long as anyone can remember, society has been ruled by a Colortocracy. From the underground feedpipes that keep the municipal park green to the healing hues viewed to cure illness to a social hierarchy based upon one's limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.Young Eddie Russett has no ambition to be anything other than a loyal drone of the Collective. With his better-than-average red perception, he could well marry Constance Oxblood and inherit the string works; he may even have enough red perception to make prefect.For Eddie, life looks colorful. Life looks good.But everything changes when he moves with his father, a respected swatchman, to East Carmine. There, he falls in love with a Grey named Jane who opens his eyes …
An astonishing, hotly anticipated new novel from the great literary fantasist and creator of Thursday Next, Jasper Fforde. As long as anyone can remember, society has been ruled by a Colortocracy. From the underground feedpipes that keep the municipal park green to the healing hues viewed to cure illness to a social hierarchy based upon one's limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.Young Eddie Russett has no ambition to be anything other than a loyal drone of the Collective. With his better-than-average red perception, he could well marry Constance Oxblood and inherit the string works; he may even have enough red perception to make prefect.For Eddie, life looks colorful. Life looks good.But everything changes when he moves with his father, a respected swatchman, to East Carmine. There, he falls in love with a Grey named Jane who opens his eyes to the painful truth behind his seemingly perfect, rigidly controlled society.Curiosity—a dangerous trait to display in a society that demands total conformity—gets the better of Eddie, who beings to wonder:Why are there not enough spoons to go around?Why is everything—and everyone—barcoded?What happened to all the people who never returned from High Saffron?And why, when you begin to question the world around you, do black-and- white certainties reduce themselves to shades of grey?Part satire, part romance, part revolutionary thriller, this is the new world from the creative and comic genius of Jasper Fforde.
Almost seven years after my first reading, again earns four stars!
Almost seven years after my first reading, again earns four stars!
Almost Wolfe-ian in its clamor of vaguely alluded details, any of which you fear you might need to remember later, in case they turn out to be lies. A whimsical universe that's purposefully forgotten its own history; possibly post-Oz, possibly post-human-engineering (re:Oryx and Crake); where pupil dilation is a creepy extinct ability and anyone can only see a narrow range of the visible spectrum in color, creating a hue-based caste system. The back matter implies the author did a bit of colorblindness research to get a feel for how things look with different types of missing hue perception, and it shows in the prose -- very compelling descriptions, a few neat hue-related puzzles. Fabulous mystery technology in a sort of mishmash of steampunk and deep future sort of way.
As Fforde gets better at knitting stories, his puns get worse. Like ya do. ;)
I look forward to the others!
