Jasper Fforde: Shades of play

Jasper Fforde likes his cultural references. His previous books have chased Charles Dickens's characters in and out of their stories and featured a journalist called Goldilocks. So it's no surprise to find that his new novel, set in a post-catastrophe world, has a reference to the Simply Red song Something Got Me Started as early as page two. It's rather apt, then, that we meet at the Malmaison Hotel in Manchester, which was partially funded by Simply Red's Mick Hucknall.

I presume that Fforde chose the hotel deliberately, but he feigns ignorance. "Really?" says the eccentrically loveable British author. "I honestly had no idea. But how absolutely brilliant. Wonderful!" Fforde loves little quirks like this. He's made a career from them, in the end. After working behind the scenes in the film industry on the likes of The Mask of Zorro and GoldenEye, he released his first book in 2001. The Eyre Affair is a playful literary detective story. So entertaining were the exploits of its hero, Thursday Next, as she searched for the kidnapper of Jane Eyre, that it spiralled into what is now a five-book series.

But Fforde's limitless imagination wasn't sated; indeed, such success encouraged him to write the Nursery Crime series, another Ffordian alternate reality that begins when Humpty Dumpty is found slumped at the bottom of the wall. But his new book, Shades of Grey, is something altogether different. For the first time, his own characters populate the story; he's not relying on the collective cultural experience to power the narrative.

"Apart from that Simply Red bit," he smiles. "But you're right. Shades of Grey doesn't relate to any piece of work that was already in my head. The previous seven books have all, essentially, been about taking things out of context, messing around with them, and making something new, exciting and dynamic. Now, I hope that's a good technique, but I realised it does really annoy me when I see these comedic pastiches of films on sketch shows or whatever. I mean, it is funny, but it relates to something else that someone else has already written. So I decided to do something different, get away from my comfort zone."

So in a sense, Shades of Grey is Fforde's bid to be taken seriously as a writer. Well, not that seriously. He writes comic fantasy, after all. But this book, which will also form the first of a series, is an ambitious undertaking simply because of its high concept. In his strangely polite world, set "at least two world orders into the future" after the mysterious event known simply as "the something that happened", people see their life in different colours. And social strata is based not on money or intellect, but upon which colour you can see. So the purples are at the top of the pile, reds nearer the bottom, and the poor old greys are worthless. Colour is a commodity, a medicine, even, administered by chromaticologists.

Amid all this, young Eddie Russett (and you can guess which colour he is) is sent to a village to learn some humility, in typical Fforde style, by conducting a pointless chair census. There he meets a plucky "grey" girl called Jane, and falls for her despite her colour - and the fact he has a bride in waiting. Their relationship triggers a chain of events that leads Eddie to question the strange, rule-bound world they live in. It's a coming-of-age-journey-meets-rom-com-meets-dystopian-fantasy. And it's great fun, a combination of Brave New World and 1984 played for laughs.

"I'd written a short story years ago about a man painting a black and white world with synthetic colours," says Fforde. "And it was an alluring idea because the incredibly abstract, counter-intuitive and bizarre notion of colour is that it doesn't exist. It's the product of the mind and the mind alone. And that's wonderful. "Go on," he laughs, "try and explain to me what red is." I grapple manfully with some idea of primary colour recalled from primary school, and give up.

"See!" says Fforde with some glee. "It was that nebulous idea that I liked. Take this entirely abstract notion and promote it to the most important part of a society: how we group ourselves." All of which means that although Eddie is caught up in a love story, Shades of Grey can be read as a political satire, too. Fforde admits that the colours are based on the British class system, where the purples are the dukes and the greys are the scullery maids. That's why, although it is set in the future, it has the feel of a Victorian or Edwardian drama.

"Although I've created this complicated new class structure, once you start populating it and allowing human beings to do the things they do, it all starts looking dismayingly familiar," he says. "There are swathes in there about the marriage market, which is very big in Eddie's world and was similarly prevalent in pre-Victorian times - and in Jane Austen." It's also a very well-mannered society - at least at the outset. Of course, it's a dramatic device to encourage our hero to break the rules, but there is the sense that Fforde was also keen to explore why our current world has become perhaps more obsessive and controlling than even the paternalistic times of the 17th and 18th centuries.

"The world of Shades of Grey is a bit like Eton run by the Khmer Rouge in terms of all the rules, regulations and merits, and how you can snitch on people for extra merits. It is a little jab towards the modern way of doing things. It seems if we want to alter people's moral behaviour, we legislate because we want things to change fast rather than slow." Fforde is pragmatic about his work - almost to a fault in that he can unintentionally seem prosaic about how he approaches it (he tells me how many words he can write in a month). But the words of one Shades of Grey review have stuck with him: that his writing has always had a kind of pleasant implausibility.

"I think that sums it up," he says amiably. "When somebody tells me an astonishing story these days, one that I know is an urban myth, I kind of feel it's actually nicer to believe in it. People tell lies all the time but we don't constantly tell them they're lying, do we? It's the same with conspiracy theories, these wonderful, implausible stories that are at the same time hugely enjoyable because humans love stories more than anything else. We're social animals and communicators.

"The best time you can ever have, I think, is around the dinner table with eight or so of your friends, telling each other stories. It's why people like me can earn money!" Ever the genial raconteur, Fforde says his hard-won writing career (he had 76 rejections before the publishers Hodder fell for The Eyre Affair) comes simply from an abhorrence of boring books. In fact, he's slightly concerned that Shades of Grey starts off slowly. It's certainly a departure from the Thursday Next or the Nursery Crime series, where, as he puts it, it's "bang bang bang, lots of subplots and we're away". But this time, he's having to create a rich and complex new world - and get enough people to love it that he can write the next in the series.

It's likely that he will, simply because his loyal fan base will lap up anything Fforde does. His online presence helps: his website is certainly detailed and generous, with each book dissected in huge detail. Cleverly, this makes his worlds work beyond the page, and makes the readers not just enjoy the books but feel a part of them. "It's wonderful to have a regular readership, and I'm really committed to them," Fforde says. "I think the trick is to give them what they want but never in the way they expect it. For example, when I wrote the follow-up to The Eyre Affair, I think people were fully expecting me to come up with the same book again, about Pride & Prejudice or something. But instead I went off on a tangent and created the book world concept [a complex place akin to the behind-the-scenes area of a book where its characters live] and made observations about boy bands.

"I write series, but they're inventive rather than formulaic, I hope. And all my books are the kind, I think, that when you get them, you really get them. I think the kinds of people who do find themselves reading my books are probably interested in the same sorts of things as me, the celebration of human 'stuff' and all the bizarre things we get up to. People take that sort of writing to heart." That's probably the key to Fforde's success. Because despite all the puns, the whimsy, the slightly geeky attention to detail, his books have a beating heart and humanity to them. The rom-com element of Shades of Grey is touching in the end: as a red, Eddie has authority over the grey Jane. But he doesn't want power over her. He wants her to respect and love him. Every scene makes this clear, but every scene is tortuous as Eddie makes more and more of a fool of himself. "You have to have romance and humour in a book," laughs Fforde.

The happy-go-lucky nature of Shades of Grey, despite the darker moments, steers a book about colour away from being a book about race. Fforde admits that it was a risk because colour is such an emotive subject, which is why he is so keen to stress again that the British class system was his inspiration. "It really isn't a novel about race. It's about human division," he says, serious for perhaps the first time since we talked about Simply Red. "The weird thing is, we know where we fit. I would feel as awkward in a room full of dukes as I would in a traveller's encampment because of my notion of who I am. But of course there would be people who could speak to both with no problem at all."

So what colour would Fforde be? "Well, artists and actors are oranges. They're out on the periphery, and you really wouldn't want them to be in control." Fforde may not be prime minister material, then, but living in one of his weird and wonderful worlds for a few days is highly recommended.