Roy G Biv

'Shades of Gray' is the name of a god-awful episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was the finale of the second season, and consisted, more or less, of crewmembers watching Commander Riker lie on a bed in sickbay interspersed with clips from older episodes, which were passed off as his 'memories'.

I want to spend some time roundly abusing this episode, which may well be the worst hour of Star Trek ever. And that's including Star Trek: Nemesis... wait, what?

Oh, right! I'm actually writing about Shades of Grey, a futuristic fantastic novel by one Jasper Fforde (whose last name, being Welsh, is probably pronounced nothing like what it looks). Shades of Grey happens, by coincidence, to remind me of the short film Rainbow War from the nineteen-eighties.

One of the things that struck me about Shades of Grey was the easy, clever style in which it was written, a style which I have noticed that just about every British author, at least of the twentieth century, whom I have read possesses. As disparate a crew as C. S. Lewis, J. K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Mr Fforde (among others) here all seem, at times, to write with elegance and wit unmatched by writers of English of other lands (most notably America, nearly all of whose popular writers - the Dan Browns, the Richard Paul Evanses, et al. - have a stylistic reach that exceeds their grasp). Fforde, as we shall see, may be said to resemble Pratchett or Adams, both of whose names are invoked on the back cover of Shades of Grey in a blurb from the L. A. Times Book Review.

I was initially thinking I would comment upon passages in which Fforde displays his effortless, breezy style, but the clever throwaway lines and oddball comments diminish as Shades of Grey continues; it turns out with good reason. Not to give too much away (not that this has stopped me in other marginal commentaries), but it transpires that Shades of Grey is the first of a series of books (of which at least three have been planned; the second, according to Mr Fforde's website, is to be published sometime in 2013). It bears a subtitle: The Road to High Saffron. While I will comment upon such witticisms as come up (the first few chapters, especially, are full of them), part of what I will comment upon is the use and abuse of power.

Here we go: