Jasper Fforde - Shades of Grey

I am hugely indebted to both Hodder and Penguin for affording me the luxury of tackling this novel, a departure from my usual oeuvre that proved rather more difficult to get onto paper than I had anticipated. I trust and hope that the tardiness in its delivery have not tested too harshly a robust relationship. In particular, I would like to thank Carolyn Mays and Jamie Hodder-Williams in the UK, and Molly Stern and Clare Ferraro in the United States, for their patience, guidance and continued faith in my abilities. My thanks also to the many talented individuals in marketing and publicity both sides of the pond, and to Bruce Giffords and Ian Paten for their sterling work in correcting what is my poor grammar and speling. Huge thanks must also go to Tif Loehnis and Luke Janklow of Janklow and Nesbit for their support and continued efforts on my behalf, and to Dot Vincent and Rebecca Folland for their work developing my considerable foreign readership. My thanks would be incomplete without mention of Eric Simonoff, who for many years oversaw my U.S. interests and without whom my presence on the western side of the Atlantic would not be as strong as it is today.

I would also like to thank Mari Fforde, for help in ways too numerous to mention, from simple research to support, editorial skills and also allowing me continued sleep when Tabitha was teething. My thanks also to Matt McDonell for his valuable insights into what it is like to be colorblind, to Mike Pringle for the “enactment” joke and to Tom, Charlie and Corisande for many valued discussions. I should also mention my immediate family of Maddy, Rosie, Jordy, Alex, Tabitha, Mum, Cress, Maggy and Stewart for simply being there, and finally my thanks to Milly, who has always believed in me and whose unwavering enthusiasm for walkies kept me well exercised.

Jasper Fforde, July 2009

Brunswick and deMauve return in

Shades of Grey 2: Painting by Numbers

Shades of Grey 3: The Gordini Protocols

2.4.16.55.021:Males are to wear dress code #6 during inter-Collective travel. Hats are encouraged but not mandatory.

It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant. It wasn’t really what I’d planned for myself—I’d hoped to marry into the Oxbloods and join their dynastic string empire. But that was four days ago, before I met Jane, retrieved the Caravaggio and explored High Saffron. So instead of enjoying aspirations of Chromatic advancement, I was wholly immersed within the digestive soup of a yateveo tree. It was all frightfully inconvenient. But it wasn’t all bad, for the following reasons: First, I was lucky to have landed upside down. I would drown in under a minute, which was far, far preferable to being dissolved alive over the space of a few weeks. Second, and more important, I wasn’t going to die ignorant. I had discovered something that no amount of merits can buy you: the truth. Not the whole truth, but a pretty big part of it. And that was why this was all frightfully inconvenient. I wouldn’t get to do anything with it. And this truth was too big and too terrible to ignore. Still, at least I’d held it in my hands for a full hour and understood what it meant.

I didn’t set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind. I found Jane, too, or perhaps she found me. It doesn’t really matter. We found each other. And although she was Grey and I was Red, we shared a common thirst for justice that transcended Chromatic politics. I loved her, and what’s more, I was beginning to think that she loved me. After all, she did apologize before she pushed me into the leafless expanse below the spread of the yateveo, and she wouldn’t have done that if she’d felt nothing.

So that’s why we’re back here, four days earlier, in the town of Vermillion, the regional hub of Red Sector West. My father and I had arrived by train the day before and overnighted at the Green Dragon. We had attended Morning Chant and were now seated for breakfast, disheartened but not surprised that the early Greys had already taken the bacon, and it remained only in exquisite odor. We had a few hours before our train and had decided to squeeze in some sightseeing.

“We could always go and see the Last Rabbit,” I suggested. “I’m told it’s unmissable.”

But Dad was not to be easily swayed by the rabbit’s uniqueness. He said we’d never see the Badly Drawn Map, the Oz Memorial, the color garden and the rabbit before our train departed. He also pointed out that not only did Vermillion’s museum have the best collection of Vimto bottles anywhere in the Collective, but on Mondays and Thursdays they demonstrated a gramophone.

“A fourteen-second clip of ‘Something Got Me Started , ’” he said, as if something vaguely Red-related would swing it.

But I wasn’t quite ready to concede my choice.

“The rabbit’s getting pretty old,” I persisted, having read the safety briefing in the “How Best to Enjoy Your Rabbit Experience” leaflet, “and petting is no longer mandatory.”

“It’s not the petting,” said Dad with a shudder, “it’s the ears. In any event,” he continued with an air of finality, “I can have a productive and fulfilling life having never seen a rabbit.”

This was true, and so could I. It was just that I’d promised my best friend, Fenton, and five others that I would log the lonely bun’s Taxa number on their behalf and thus allow them to note it as “proxy seen” in their animal-spotter books. I’d even charged them twenty-five cents each for the privilege—then blew the lot on licorice for Constance and a new pair of synthetic red shoelaces for me.

Dad and I bartered like this for a while, and he eventually agreed to visit all of the town’s attractions but in a circular manner, to save on shoe leather. The rabbit came last, after the color garden.

So, having conceded to at least include the rabbit in the morning’s entertainment, Dad returned to his toast, tea and copy of Spectrum as I looked idly about the shabby breakfast room, seeking inspiration for the postcard I was writing. The Green Dragon dated from before the Epiphany and, like much of the Collective, had seen many moments, each of them slightly more timeworn than the one before. The paint in the room was peeling, the plaster molding was dry and crumbly, the linoleum tabletops were worn to the canvas and the cutlery was either bent, broken or missing. But the hot smell of toast, coffee and bacon, the flippant affability of the staff and the noisy chatter of strangers enjoying transient acquaintance gave the establishment a peculiar charm that the reserved, eminently respectable tearooms back home in Jade-under-Lime could never match. I noticed also that despite the lack of any Rules regarding seat plans in “non-hue-specific” venues, the guests had unconsciously divided the room along strictly Chromatic lines. The one Ultraviolet was respectfully given a table all to himself, and several Greys stood at the door waiting patiently for an empty table even though there were places available.