With the British Genre Fiction Focus on hiatus over the holidays, and most of the kids I teach in real life relaxing anywhere other than the education centre that employs me, I've had a fair bit of time to play with, lately. I don't want to tell you yet what I've been doing with it yet—I just don't want to jinx the thing before it's finished—but suffice to say this project has been as much of a time-suck as the columns I curate for Tor.com.
Long story short, I've been neglecting my inbox for a bit, so I spent a few hours picking through it this morning, in the course of which I came across a recent press release from the Institute of Art and Ideas, informing me of an event in which Jasper Fforde and Adam Robots—I mean, ah, Roberts—joined forces with Leaving Las Vegas director Mike Figgis to ask and answer questions about the imagination.
This is the pitch:
We believe reason is our best tool for acquiring true knowledge of the world. But Picasso said "art is a lie that tells the truth," and many others before him have made similar claims. Are they right? Can imagination lead us to truths hidden from the rational mind, or is this romantic hogwash?
And this is the video:
It's worth a watch.
If the embed above isn't working... well. That'd be because Blogger is being a bother. But what can it do to disrupt an old-fashioned link like this?
Now I'll be knee-deep in seekrits for the foreseeable, but I do solemnly swear to keep a closer eye on my inbox going forward, so if anyone needs me, that's how to make the magic happen.
The Mighty Shandar, the most powerful wizard the world has ever seen, returns to the unUnited Kingdoms. Clearly, he didn't solve the Dragon Problem, and must hand over his fee: eighteen dray-weights of gold.
But the Mighty Shandar doesn't do refunds, and vows to eliminate the dragons once and for all—unless sixteen year old Jennifer Strange and her sidekicks from the Kazam house of enchantment can bring him the legendary jewel, the Eye of Zoltar.
The only thing that stands in their way is a perilous journey with a 50% Fatality Index—through the Cambrian Empire to the Leviathan Graveyard, at the top of the deadly Cadir Idris mountain. It's a quest like never before, and Jennifer soon finds herself fighting not just for her life, but for everything she knows and loves...
***
Over the years, the Troll Wars have taken a terrible toll on the Kingdoms of Britain. All but a few of these fights have been finished in a matter of minutes—trolls, it transpires, are hardy targets—nevertheless countless lives have been lost to this pointless conflict... leading, among other things, to an overabundance of orphans. And what are orphans for if not enslaving, eh?
Jennifer Strange, the narrator of Jasper Fforde's fun-filled fantasy fable, was one of the lucky ones:
Instead of being sold into the garment, fast-food or hotel industries, I got to spend my six years of indentured servitude with a company named Kazam, a registered House of Enchantment run by the Great Zambini. Kazam did what all Houses of Enchantment used to do: hire out wizards to perform magical feats. The problem was that in the past half-century magic had faded, so we were really down to finding lost shoes, rewiring houses, unblocking drains and getting cats out of trees. (p.2)
To make matters worse, the Great Zambini immediately disappeared, leaving Jennifer to save Kazam from a fate worse than death... dreaded irrelevance! In The Last Dragonslayer, she did exactly that—then, in The Song of the Quarkbeast, she got mixed up in the machinations of an idiot king. Now, having "saved dragons from extinction, averted war between the nations of Snodd and Brecon and helped the power of magic begin to re-establish itself," (p.3) our ever so patient protagonist—sweet sixteen this year—finds herself in a bit of a pickle.
Actually, the problem might be more of a ghost pepper than your typical pickle, because Kazam's actions have attracted the wrath of the Mighty Shandar. One unintended consequence of Jennifer's aforementioned intervention was to make a mockery of the professional pride of the most powerful wizard in the world, who'd been hired, as it happens, to destroy all dragons. Kazam can either sacrifice Feldspar Axiom Firebreath IV and, um, Colin, or do as Shandar demands, and seek out the massively powerful magical artifact known only as the Eye of Zoltar.
If it exists.
Which is at least as unlikely as Jennifer's chances of surviving for long enough in the dangerous Cambrian Empire to get to the Leviathan Graveyard (about which no tales are told, because no one's survived to tell them) at the top of Cadir Idris (a mountain so monolithic that its peak has never been seen) where the Eye of Zoltar is said to be stashed. Assuming it isn't a tall tale in the first place.
With the recent release of the latest Thursday Next novel, my wrangler over at Tor.com put out the word that she was interested in some sort of introduction to the works and worlds of one Jasper Fforde.
I need not add that I jumped at the chance to burble about the various series he has on the go. I put together a primer on the first volumes of all four — two of which I've reviewed on The Speculative Scotsman, here and here. Then I got my thinking cap on, wondering which of The Eyre Affair, The Big Over Easy, Shades of Grey and The Last Dragonslayer would be the best candidate for new readers to begin with.
My answer might surprise you.
Or, if you've been reading TSS carefully, it might not! :)
Here's a bit, in any event, from the first part of the article, which went live on Tor.com late last week:
This month alone saw the release of the seventh volume of Fforde's most singular saga: The Woman Who Died A Lot stars the former and presumably future literary detective Thursday Next, whose sublime shenanigans through time and text led, at the last, to the loss of her odd employment. It’s a terrific new novel, but if you haven’t read Fforde before, know now that this is not the introduction you or indeed he deserves.
Nor, in all likelihood, will Fforde’s next book be, whether it’s a sequel at long last — or indeed a prequel — to Shades of Grey, or The Return of Shandar, which is to say the conclusion of the Dragonslayer trilogy.
What I’m saying is: if you aren’t already reading Jasper Fforde, you should be, but it can be difficult, as has become apparent, to determine where, exactly, and with what, one should start. This may or may not be because Fforde lives and works in Wales, the undisputed Kingdom of confusion, and home, of course, to the community of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
In any case, that’s what An Ode to Fforde is all about. It’s essentially a primer, not so much to help you make up your mind whether or not Jasper Fforde’s fiction is for you — if you ask me, and self-evidently somebody did, it’s for everyone — but rather to answer that eternal question: which of this imaginative madman’s many and various books would you be best to begin with?
A long time ago magic faded away, leaving behind only yo-yos, the extremely useful compass-pointing-to-North enchantment and the spell that keep bicycles from falling over.
Things are about to change. Big Magic is on the rise, and King Snodd IV of Hereford has realised that he who controls magic controls almost anything.
One person stands between Snodd and his plans for power and riches beyond the wildest dreams of avarice: meet Jennifer Strange, sixteen-year-old acting manager of Kazam, the employment agency for sorcerers and soothsayers. With only one functioning wizard and her faithful assistant 'Tiger' Prawns, Jennifer must use every ounce of ingenuity to derail King Snodd's plans. It may involve a trip on a magic carpet at the speed of sound to the Troll Wall, the mysterious Transient Moose, and a powerless sorceress named Once Magnificent Boo.
But one thing is certain: Jennifer Strange will not relinquish the noble powers of magic to big business and commerce without a fight.
***
To date, the closest Jasper Fforde has ever gotten to disappointing me was with the tease on the last page of Shades of Grey, wherein he promised not one but two sequels in the series, then roundly announced the first of them for 2013.
2013!
Even now, a year and a half on from Shades of Grey's publication, the wait for Painting By Numbers seems impossibly long. But in the interim, behold: this whole other series.
And it's not to be sniffed at. The Last Dragonslayer was a terrific bit of whimsy, all droll dragons and indentured orphans, yet in the same moment it was more than that. It was an accusatory index finger leveled in the general direction of genre fiction as we understand it; an introduction to fun in fantasy; and an argument, memorably made, that self-seriousness is not necessarily a necessity when it comes to swords and sorcery.
Needless to say The Last Dragonslayer also left the door wide open for more stories set against the brilliantly bureaucratic backdrop of Kazam, which is to say one of only two surviving magic-for-hire outfits still operating in the Ununited Kingdoms. Currently managed by the accidental last dragonslayer herself, Jennifer Strange - late of the Sisterhood of the Blessed Lady of the Lobster and still only sixteen years young - Kazam has fallen on hard times...
...as has the entire magical community, actually. Or rather the remnants thereof, So when the corrupt King of Hereford, the fourth in a long line of approximately four Snodds, contrives a contest between Kazam and its only serious competitor, Industrial Magic - recently re-branded as iMagic, of course - it's a real winner takes all affair, because the loser will lose everything, up to and including limbs, and possibly lives.
To make matters worse, circumstances - or perhaps something more substantial - seem set on roundly wrongfooting Jennifer and the murder of retired magicians she looks out for. When Kazam's most powerful licensed magician turns to stone whilst performing a bit of routine wizardry, it's only the first in a series of unfortunate events to befall Jennifer and her friends, and at the worst possible moment, such that one begins to wonder: could someone, or something, be out to get them?
Why yes!
Hilarity abounds again in The Song of the Quarkbeast, if not in quite such quantity as it did in The Last Dragonslayer, then not far off its high magical mark. Bouncing around as it does from one scene to the next with the reader's attention in tow, albeit "in an affectionate, non-malicious, hardly-hurting-you-at-all sort of way," it hops and skips with seemingly little rhyme or reason; that is unless we're looking at set-up for The Return of Shandar, and I think perhaps we are. Thus, this second novel in the series has a decidedly episodic quality, but not to the extent that it's an insurmountable issue, and indeed, in the endgame, thing comes together marvelously.
Fforde has such a light touch that he makes this sort of thing look easy, when it's assuredly not, and even at its most distracted, The Song of the Quarkbeast is hugely entertaining. Warm but wan, British, and yet brilliant, it is what you might describe as a "sarcoluminescent" novel: so funny that it emits a noticeable glow... particularly in the ebook edition, which is rife with exclusive footnotes, including one which delves deeper into the subject of sarcoluminescence. There is a priceless revelation lifted wholesale from Star Wars, and such gems as "for every evil genius there must be a ludicrously beautiful woman apparently doing very little at his side," which had me in such spasms that I had to stop reading for a moment.
Like The Last Dragonslayer, Shades of Grey and the Thursday Next novels, this book is certainly representative of an acquired taste, and as Fforde asserts in another footnote - on the arguable excellence of camel's ears as a snack - "an acquired taste" is usually shorthand for something "extremely nasty."
But no. Not in this case. Particularly considering that it's the middle volume in what purports to be a trilogy, The Song of the Quarkbeast is surprisingly delicious in and of itself. It is to be consumed in a single sitting, very much in the mode of a Quarkbeast, who'll devour a tin of dog food - can and all - in moments, and immediately ask for another.
In the good old days, magic was powerful, unregulated by government, and even the largest spell could be woven without filling in magic release form B1-7g.
Then the magic started fading away.
Fifteen-year-old Jennifer Strange runs Kazam, an employment agency for soothsayers and sorcerers. But work is drying up. Drain cleaner is cheaper than a spell, and even magic carpets are reduced to pizza delivery.
So it's a surprise when the visions start. Not only do they predict the death of the Last Dragon at the hands of a dragonslayer, they also point to Jennifer, and say something is coming.
Big Magic...
***
If you've ever wondered what fantasy could be, if it didn't take itself so very, very seriously, look no further than Fforde.
The Last Dragonslayer is I think an ideal introduction to his work. Pitched ostensibly as a fantasy for young adults, Jasper Fforde's ninth novel in the first in a new trilogy with no real entry requirements, about dragons and magic and, as ever, the soul-crushing weight of bureaucracy. And come one, come all, because there's nothing childish about this book. It's short, is all.
Short, and so sweet I'd advise you brush your teeth both before and after reading it. But dear readers: do read it.
In the absence of The Great Zambini, who vanished in a puff of smoke at the climax of a magic show for birthday babies six months ago, the indentured orphan Jennifer Strange manages Kazam, which is to say one of only two remaining sorcerers-for-hire outfits in all the twenty-eight nations of the Ununited Kingdoms.
You must be wondering what happened to all the others. Well:
A half-century ago Mystical Arts Management was considered a sound career choice and citizens fought for a place. These days, it was servitude only, as with agricultural labour, hotels and fast-food joints. Of the twenty or so Houses of Enchantment that had existed fifty years ago, only Kazam in the Kingdom of Hereford and Industrial Magic over in Stroud were still going. It was an industry in terminal decline. The power of magic had been ebbing for centuries and, with it, the relevance of sorcerers. Once a wizard would have the ear of a king; today we rewire houses and unblock drains. (p.19)
Lamentably, even that's an almighty guddle in this day and age, because "an unwelcome legacy from the fourteenth century" means "any unlicensed act of sorcery done outisde the boundaries of a House of Enchantment is punishable by... public burning." (p.52) So for every lead pipe Kazam's sorcerers are paid a proverbial pittance to levitate, Jennifer must fill out a slew of paperwork. But work the various individuals under Kazam's care must, because "even inexplicable entities comprised of charged particles kept in order by a weak magnetic field need cash to survive." (p.45)
Wisdom for the ages, there!
Anyway, when pre-cogs all across the country start predicting, day and date, the death of the last dragon, the thought of a vast land-grab - for the dragon Montcassion has 320 square miles all to itself - stirs the people of the Ununited Kingdoms into a frenzy, such that soon war seems sure to break out between Hereford and its put-upon neighbours. Sensibly, Jennifer doesn't want that to happen, but only the dragonslayer can enter the dragonlands - the better to talk some sense into Moncassion - and she's no dragonslayer.
Or... wait. What? She is?
Oh. Alrighty then.
The Last Dragonslayer feels all too brief at less than 300 pages of rather large print, but other than that, there's not a complaint I would make about it. It is simply a delightful little thing, complete with a perpetual teapot and feral sheep, which is to say a quick-witted, brilliantly British sense of humour and an imagination glad to go there, where other authors wouldn't dare, for fear of having fun... which as we all know lessens a text.
But no. No it doesn't, and I would argue that The Last Dragonslayer is proof positive of that contrary conclusion. Whimsy and idiosyncrasy may well be acquired tastes among some genre readers, but equally the staunch self-importance of so many more celebrated sf and fantasy sagas can leave leagues of newcomers cold. Jasper Fforde, meanwhile, will warm your cockles through and through, presuming you can swallow the inimitable silliness he has made his bread and butter.
If not, never mind. After all, in this world "unimaginable horrors share the day with moments of confusing perplexity and utter randomness. To call it a madhouse would insult even the maddest of madhouses." (p.17) Home sweet home for Jasper Fforde fans, then. And I shouldn't wonder that The Last Dragonslayer will win over a fair few newcomers to the fold too, to whom I would bid a very warm welcome.
Hundreds of years in the future, after the Something that Happened, the world is an alarmingly different place. Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is determined by your perception of colour.
Eddie Russett is an above average Red who dreams of moving up the ladder by marriage to Constance Oxblood. Until he is sent to the Outer Fringes where he meets Jane – a lowly Grey with an uncontrollable temper and a desire to see him killed.
For Eddie, it’s love at first sight. But his infatuation will lead him to discover that all is not as it seems in a world where everything that looks black and white is really shades of grey...
***
"Males are to wear dress-code #6 during intercollective travel. Hats are encouraged, but not mandatory." (p.1)
So begins Shades of Grey: with a cartoon splash of irreverence and a dab emblematic of the ridiculous regime young Eddie Russett must find a way to function under. A Red, and the son of a semi-respectable Swatchman, his is a world in which colour rather than creed reigns supreme. You see, not since the Something that Happened happened, untold hundreds of years ago, have people been able to perceive the world as we - the Previous - do. If you can pick out a single colour from the rainbow haze, you're lucky; at least then you won't be designated a Grey. But the full spectrum of shades has been remaindered to all. Thus, in the Chromatic hierarchy of Fforde's fantastic creation, classes are distinctly delineated: if you can see predominantly green, you're a Green, and you'll have to do the things Greens do; blue, and you're a Blue, and so on.
What Eddie stands to lose in the match, should Jane ever stop trying to kill or otherwise injure him long enough to acquiesce - far from a forgone conclusion - runs the gamut: his prospects, his hardly hard-earned place in Chromatic society, his return ticket to the city -- all come under threat the closer he gets to this Grey. But what he stands to gain is everything, equally: an understanding of the world no-one since the Something that Happened has approached. Answers, for instance, to such timeless questions as "What was in The Little Engine that Could that might cause a damaging rift in society? What was so wrong with the telephone that it had to be withdrawn? Why was Mr Simply Red no longer listened to?" (p.125)
Oh, and love. True, unadulterated, colour-blind love.
From first to last, Shades of Grey is a technicolour treat. Having somehow contrived to miss The Last Dragonslayer, Thursday Next and Nursery Crime, I'd never read anything like it, nor will you have unless you're already a dyed-in-the-wool Fforde fan -- of which I hear there are a fair few. Gratefully Shades of Grey is the opening bow of a magnificent new series from the word-of-mouth success, and though it's all worldbuilding and no narrative for the first half, its world is such a wonder of whimsy and well-to-do wickedness, and Fforde's efforts on its behalf so very, very sterling, that I was won over well in advance of the story beats starting -- and never to return, I dare say.
In fact I can point to the very moment when I signed on the dotted line:
"The 'Standard Variable' procedure was in place to allow very minor changes of the Rules. The most obvious example was the 'Children under ten are to be given a glass of milk and a smack at 11 am' rule, which for almost two hundred years was interpreted as the literal World of Munsell, and children were given the glass of milk, and then clipped around the ear. It took a brave Prefect to point out - tactfully, of course - that this was doubtless a spelling mistake, and should have read 'snack.'" (p.32)
Now if one were particularly keen on incorporating colour-based analogies into one's criticism, one might suggest Shades of Grey wears a coat of many colours, for it seems a veritable confusion of genres at first. On the one hand, it's science-fiction. It's set in the far-flung future, with technologies centuries advanced from our own - self-cleaning motorways spring unbidden to mind - and of course the Something that Happened is the collapse by any other name. Shades of Grey also boasts all the Baffling Capitalisation we've learned to love in fantasy, and shares with that species of storytelling a propensity to revel in the invented technical. Come the climax, there's a bit of a quest, too, and we fantasy fans appreciate a good quest, don't we?
Add to that elements of the crime thriller: Eddie's last moments in the capital involve a wrongspotted Purple seemingly struck down by the dreaded Mildew, and there's been a death in East Carmine that seems... less than accidental, shall we say. And Shades of Grey is a love story, through and through: wonderfully painted and perfectly framed. And it's a comedy, of course -- something of a farce. Hence all the time I spent beside myself with laughter, because Fforde's latest original fiction is truly hilarious. Unspeakably so, such that I had to explain several giggling fits to my own partner in crime.
You could feasibly describe Fforde's novel as a rom-com come crime fantasy set against a farcical sci-fi setting. You could call it The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time meets The City and the City with a slap of The Windup Girl and a tickle of Sense and Sensibility. Or you could just... not.
Jasper Fforde hates genre. In an interview with the Scotsman this year he called our insatiable desire to file every little thing away under this category and that "the measles of the book world," and having written six novels and counting in fact set in BookWorld - the very place! - Fforde of all folks should know. For its duration, Shades of Grey resists easy classification, seeming when all is said and done a sort of antidote to genre -- that is if were one to take the measles metaphor seriously, which one (I hasten to add) does not. And yet too often 'genre' works a byword for predictable, cookie-cutter crud, with little originality or imagination of its own to speak of... with only its strict subservience to a certain allocation of expectations left to advocate its place.
Shades of Grey is a story restrained by no such supposed strictures. Erudite, endlessly inventive and punch-drunk for fun, it is a genre novel which could never have come to pass had it been a genre novel as we've learned to understand such things. It is an argument for what genre could be, were it to spread its wings more often beyond the boundaries of the tidy little storage compartment we as an audience and an industry seem to insist it remain in.
And it is an argument which demands a fair and unbiased hearing, for I would sooner the Something that Happened actually happened than stand by while the Nothing that Didn't continued to, ad infinitum. Truly, Shades of Grey is the stuff of superlatives.
***
Shades of Grey
by Jasper Fforde
UK Publication: January 2011, Hodder & Stoughton (PB) US Publication: March 2011, Penguin (PB)
