Between the Pages

Hundreds of years into the future, the world is a very different place, where your path in life, and your position in ‘the collective’ (as the human race is now known) is determined by what colour you see, and how well you are able to see it.  Eddie Russet is a Red, which places him quite high in what is effectively a caste system.  When he and his father visit East Carmine, he meets Jane, a Grey – which is the lowest class.  For Eddie it is love at first sight, but Jane most certainly does not return his feelings.  However, strange happenings are afoot in East Carmine (and outside of it), and as Eddie investigates them, he discovers that everything is not as it seems in the collective, and the powers that be might just be hiding a huge secret…

I’ve read Jasper Fforde before, and generally find his books to be very enjoyable.  Moreover, this one was a dystopian novel (albeit a humorous one), and dystopia is a favourite genre of mine.  So I was looking forward to reading this book, confident that I would at least like it, if not love it.  And…unfortunately I was wrong.  I found that I just couldn’t get along with this book at all.  The dystopian world depicted was interesting enough, but I felt that the author was just piling wordplay upon wordplay, to make his point about what a crazy mixed up future this is, and it all got a bit laborious.  Even worse, there is very little actual plot, and I didn’t feel that any of the characters were particularly well drawn.

I have read other reviews of this book, and for the most part they are extremely favourable, so I am certainly in the minority with my opinion on this one. I should say that I can see why other readers might love this book. It wasn’t dreadful – and indeed some moments did make me laugh, as Fforde can be amusingly inventive in his writing, but – I realised about halfway through that I didn’t like these characters, and I didn’t dislike them either.  I just didn’t really care.

Perhaps I felt let down by it, because I had such high hopes for the book, but either way, I’m afraid this just wasn’t one for me.

(Author’s website can be found here.)