This past Thursday, I made sure I had a reasonable finish from work and headed in to Leeds to listen to Jasper Fforde talk about his latest novel, Shades of Grey. I’ve been to one of his signings before, but never to one of his talks. But I had heard that his was a fabulous talker, so I was very much looking forward to it.

Despite a little ribbing from my colleagues at work…

You’re going to a what? To do what?

The poor misguided souls just don’t understand…

Anyway is was everything I hoped it would be, and I managed to grab a few photos and a very short snippet of him reading from the book.

And I knew I’d never get away with not sharing! So here they are…

I ended up fumbling the camera so only managed to get a short useable snippet of him reading from the book.

To give it some context, the novel is set in a world where your social status is decided by what colour you can perceive: The Colortocracy: is the hierarchy of social order your perception of colour places you in (think the British Social classes in the 18/19th centuries) with Purple being the highest, then Blues, Greens, Yellows, Oranges and Reds, with the Greys having the least rights of all.

The novel’s hero, Eddie Russett (a red)  is explaining the test all of the populace takes at age 20 to determine one’s colour perception…

 

 

We also managed to pick-up a few facts about his writing.

He loves a writing dare does Jasper Fforde, and most of his books start from him writing himself out of a ‘hole’ in some way.

(I’m paraphrasing most of these, because I forgot to take a note pad!)

• Thursday Next came from the premise that Jane Eyre has been kidnapped; discuss…
• The Big Over Easy, was simply, Who Killed Humpty Dumpty
• and the entire novel 100,000 word + novel of The Fourth Bear, exists solely to explain the porridge…***

The challenge being not only to write himself out of the hole, but to also create a world in which the answer he comes up with not only works but is believable and in fact perfectly reasonable..

 

*** Think about it… Daddy Bear’s big bowl is too hot, Mummy Bear’s medium bowl is too cold and Baby Bear’s little bowl is just right… How is that even logically possible? The answer? There must have been another bear, and everything else in the book exists to prove that point.

 

We also learnt that while the Thursday Next books to excellently around the world, and have been translated in to 18 languages, The Nursery Crime books have yet to be translated and this is due to Humpty Dumpty and Goldilocks not being part of non-English speaking cultures apparently.