♪♪
-Hello and welcome to "Book Lust."
I'm your host, Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is novelist Jasper Fforde,
whose new book "Red Side Story" has just been published.
Jasper, it's so nice to see you again.
I feel like we're old friends by now,
although we're not old...
-Thank you. -...we're just friends.
-No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
-So, "Red Side Story."
The second book in a trilogy
that began with "Shades of Grey."
We were talking before, and one of the --
before we started recording,
and one of the things I was saying,
it was that I remember the last time
I interviewed you was at University Book Store
here in Seattle, and we were talking about you had --
you had written "Shades of Grey"
and some other -- some young adult novels,
fantasy novels,
and we were talking about one of the --
you were in Seattle to talk about one of the fantasy novels.
And I remember saying to you,
"Oh, Jasper, when is the sequel to 'Shades of Grey' coming out?"
Because I loved -- I mean, I just loved the notion.
Could you talk about the world of "Shades of Grey"
and now "Red Side Story"? -Yeah. Sure.
So, yeah. Well, thank you for that,
and it's wonderful to be back talking to you again.
I mean, it really is. But yeah.
It was such a lovely, lovely chat.
I looked, actually, at my notes, to see -- because I do
production notes for when I go on tour,
and I looked at the tour, and it did say
that the high point of the tour, because it was --
the high point of the tour was talking to you
at Seattle University Book Shop, so that's wonderful.
-Aw, shucks. -So, yep.
[ Both laugh ]
So anyway, so "Red Side Story" and "Shades of Grey."
So, "Shades of Grey" was my seventh novel,
and the previous six had been
four Thursday Next books and two Nursery Crime books.
And they work upon the conceit of essentially taking
what is already there and then messing around with it.
So it's either messing around with the classics
in a sort of reverently irreverent way,
or it's retelling nursery rhyme stories.
But all of them, all six books,
were essentially moving furniture around.
Like, moving memory furniture around in people's heads
in an unusual way.
And for my seventh book, I thought, "Well, Jasper, come on.
You're meant to be a novelist,
so you're meant to be writing stuff that's your own work."
So, I thought, "Right, let's take a --
Let's really go for something that's very unusual,
very different, hopefully a bit original."
So, essentially, it's about a world order,
maybe 500 years, 1,000 years, 1,500 years in the future,
past some unknown sort of problem.
There's something that happened that's referred to.
And the -- it's a world order based entirely on visual color.
So, the hierarchy is based
not on something mundane like voting for people,
but on the colors that you can see.
So, if you can see the most amount of blue in your village,
you'll be the blue prefect, red, yellow, and so forth.
And the amount of these colors that you can see
sets you permanently
within the structure of the society.
So, what you can see at your Ishihara test
at the age of 20 is what you are forever,
you know, and all worrisome life choices removed.
You know, who you can marry, what you can do.
But the greys, the achromatic greys,
who can see no color at all,
are right at the bottom of the heap.
And into this rather strange and this rather off-kilter world,
I've put my -- the hero of my story,
Eddie Russet, who's a red,
about to take his Ishihara, and he meets Jane Grey,
who's this rather lively, shall we say, grey,
who kind of opens his eyes to the sort of inequity
of the society.
And that was basically -- that's basically the idea,
if you like.
-And did you know right from the beginning
that you were going to write a trilogy?
I mean, I just wanted -- I think what I wanted
was more about Eddie and Jane and the world.
It wasn't that it ended -- maybe I'm wrong.
My memory could be wrong.
But it didn't end in, like, someone tied to a railroad track
and the train is approaching, and you have to read this.
I mean, it was a complete novel in my mind.
I just wanted more of them.
-Yeah. I mean, there was always --
there was always sort of two sequels in the offing.
I was always going to do that.
I think the ending of that first one
was maybe a little bit of a cliff hanger,
and we did leave Eddie and Jane having sort of fallen in love,
you know, and it... -Right.
-...started off by sort of, you know,
Jane sort of basically threatening to kill him,
and almost killing him several times.
The fact that she didn't is sort of the reasons
why we think she might quite like him.
And, of course, they can't marry at the end of the --
they can't get married at the end.
Marriage is a big institution in the book.
They can't get married at the end of the book
because he's a red and she's been made a green
and they're complementary colors,
and they can never meet and talk or anything,
so a bit of a sort of conundrum.
The point about it is that --
and the reason that -- and I must apologize, obviously,
to people listening for waiting --
having to wait so long for a sequel --
is that it didn't sell very well.
And I think what happened is that people wanted
more of the memory furniture moving around in their heads.
And they looked at the back and they thought, well,
I like nursery rhymes.
I like Thursday Next.
I like all that, you know,
the classics and mucking around, and...
-Right. -...maybe this isn't for me.
And so, it didn't sell very well,
although it got good reviews,
and the people who read my books very generously said
they enjoyed it a huge amount.
So, we went back to Thursday and we...
-Right. -...did some various things.
But this is the thing -- Just in the same way
as "The Eyre Affair" was basically generated
word of mouth by, as far as I can see,
English teachers and librarians --
because back in those days, there was no social media,
you know, so there's a lot of emails going,
and bulletin boards very early on --
there was a sort of ground swell of sort of feeling,
and I used to get all these emails coming in saying,
you know, when are we going to do it,
when are we going to see this, we really need to see this.
And in the end, I thought, you know,
I don't think this is an unwanted child after all, this book.
I think actually people really genuinely
have taken it to heart, and I should be writing a sequel.
-Yeah.
-So I reread it like four or five times,
and then I just carried on exactly where we left off.
It's like a week later... -Yeah.
-...and we just carry on with everything else.
-One of the things I loved about the book is --
or loved about the world, I guess --
is that your name reflects the color that you are.
So, I kind of had this picture of you,
you know, sitting in your office right there,
looking at a thesaurus
to find all of the synonyms for the word red,
and how much fun you must have had with the somewhat reds,
like the mauves.
And then Eddie's a true red.
87 percent, I think, is his Ishihara score.
Did you have -- I mean, obviously,
it's a very repressive society
that Eddie and Jane are trying to --
first, trying to understand what the something --
what the something was that happened,
and then where they fit into this greater world,
because you drop a bunch of clues, you know,
that we hear when Eddie and Jane hear it.
Did you know from the beg-- do you know what's --
Is this a fair question? Do you know --
Are we going to learn what happened?
Or is that not important?
-I think we are. I think what we're doing
is kind of peeling off onion,
you know, onion layers, if you like.
So that the first book was very much
Eddie doesn't know what's going on,
and Jane says, "No. This is what's going on and it's bad."
And then in the second book, it's like,
actually, Jane had no idea what was going on, and in fact,
there's another layer entirely.
And just things start peeling back,
and it's as though, you know, you're lifting a curtain
and there's another curtain behind.
You know?
Or, if you go to a very, very swish theater
and the curtains open, and another curtain comes up,
and then there's a safety curtain behind that.
And I think I wanted them to be --
I wanted Jane, because she was always the one
who seemed to know stuff in the first book.
I wanted Jane not to know stuff.
I wanted Jane to be kind of like Eddie in the first book,
and now they're really both grappling
with these uncertainties.
I think I do want --
I think that's something that happened --
I would like to reveal it,
but I think by the time I come to reveal it,
I think it might be irrelevant, perhaps?
I mean, I'd like it to be one of those
where something that you thought was really huge...
-Right. -...suddenly, it's like,
actually, that's probably
the most least interesting thing in the story.
But I'm not sure.
But there are clues sort of littered
throughout both books as to what that something
that happened might be.
-Right. Right. Yeah.
-So, I think I will reveal it. Yeah.
-Were you thinking of,
when you started on this project of this very repressive world,
based on kind of an unreasonable basis for who you are,
so you're living a very narrow existence.
You know, people are talking about it, you know,
like Orwell, but funny.
I think we need to say how funny it is.
You know? -Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
-Was that in the back of your mind?
I mean, your books are just wonderful fantasies
and they're perfect for people who love to read,
and librarians and libraries,
and I get to be in one of -- I was in one of your books,
me, the librarian.
I loved that, and I thanked you already for it,
but I thank you again.
So, it's not that it's the real --
The Thursday Next books are so clearly not
of this particular world where we're living,
but the "Red Side Story" --
"Shades of Grey" and "Red Side Story,"
you could kind of argue that --
or, maybe you wouldn't need to argue,
that it's not so far from reality.
-No, it's a really, really good point,
and it's actually something that I hadn't considered,
but when I go on tour and I talk to people, you know,
in the signing queue, and they have Q&As and everything,
it's always great fun, because, obviously,
I bring something to it, but I always take things away.
So, it's actually --
it's very enjoyable, and actually,
I get to think about new things.
And someone said to me,
"Jasper, I think the 'Shades of Grey' series is
the only one of your series
that could potentially be set in our world."
-Yeah.
-And I couldn't see anything that I could argue with that.
-Right. -And I suddenly thought, no,
that actually might be in our world.
I mean, a very different world. It's a long time in the future,
But things happen, as we all know, very, very quickly,
in the last 60 or 70 years,
if you imagine the changes that we've had on this planet,
and certainly when it comes to technology.
So I sort of took that in mind, and thought, yeah,
that's actually something I could promote in it,
is not have any -- you know, something magically absurd
that couldn't possibly exist in our world.
But, you know, the great thing about satire,
and I think it is a satirical book, is, you know,
a satire counterpoints the absurdities
in the real world by, you know,
making fun of it in a book and exaggerating everything.
But I kind of -- it's almost like the --
I wanted to go -- You know,
"1984" is the primary source for anyone
who is doing some sort of, you know,
future dystopia or social dystopia.
And that was very much sort of terrifying,
of this sort of unknown external forces
that were ranked against you.
And I wanted to actually turn that inside
and have it internal forces,
so the terrors of being in a small village,
and the fact that you could have --
the guards and the prisoners are actually the same people.
That they're -- that they are kept in this regime
simply by their own adherence to this set of rules,
which seem, a lot of the time, very arbitrary.
-Right.
-And I think there's a truth there,
somewhere, you know, in there.
But it's great fun to play with those absurdities
and also with things that we, you know,
don't discuss very much, like marriage markets,
you know, and reproduction politics,
and stuff like that,
which obviously come into the book quite a lot.
So, it's just a nice way to experiment with,
yeah, absurdities of being human,
but also the pleasure and delights of being a human,
because we're wonderful and absurd and hideous
and awful and fantastic and funny,
and all of them mixed up in the same thing, and yeah.
If I wasn't a human, I think I'd probably like to be one.
-But thank goodness you are, because we have those books,
I think.
When you were a kid,
is what you read fantasy?
Was that your big -- -Yeah.
I mean, I like a lot of everything.
I mean, I like -- if I read something and I enjoy it,
or I watch something and I enjoy it,
the genre doesn't tend to matter so much.
The things that really excited me, though,
were fantasy and sci-fi
because I just loved the idea that you could --
it's like smoke and mirrors.
It's why I was attracted to the film industry.
You can just create this fantasy world,
this amazing world,
where there's nothing that can't happen,
simply by the power of one's own imagination.
I mean, I was, as everyone is,
you know, a big fan of the Narnia books,
you know, C.S. Lewis, when I was a kid,
and reading a lot of children's sci-fi.
There was a writer named Nicholas Fiske,
who seems lost to the world now,
but it was great stuff when I was reading him.
And they were just great stories,
and they just took you away from this sort of
slightly mundane childhood and into this world
where people had adventures, you know?
And I think that's what we want.
We want to go on adventures or be taken on adventures
and just discover amazing ideas
that we didn't realize were there.
-And that's what your books do.
I mean, I think kind of all this genre labeling
has always upset me, because it limits --
it immediately limits the readership
because, first of all, it's in a different place in the library,
normally, than from, you know, the fiction alphabetical thing.
You know, it's going to be in fantasy and science fiction.
And many people have never gotten into
the wonder of science fiction and fantasy.
You know, they've never read a book
that allowed them to see everything
that those types of books could do.
You know, and so, because we say --
you know, because I say,
"'Red Side Story' or 'Shades of Grey'
or 'The Eyre Affair' is fantasy,"
you know, there's a whole, unfortunately, of course,
group of people who their mind --
you know, they say, "I don't read fantasy."
But yet, what they -- I mean,
"Shades of Grey" and "Red Side Story" are adventure stories
that happen to be set in -- you know, that are very funny
and happen to be set in a world that is not our own.
-It is a problem.
I mean, I don't know what I'd call mine, social satire,
or social adventure, or...? -Right.
-It's very difficult. I think genre is --
Yeah, I call it the measles of the book world.
It'd be nice if libraries were based on, you know,
color of the cover. -Oh, yes, right?
-Then someone would come in and say, "Well,
I read this really good book, and it had a red cover.
Do you have any other books with red covers?
Because they're clearly good."
I mean, the part of the library
that I really like is the oversized book section,
because then you've got --
then you've got the sort of illustrated, you know,
Bronte country next to Farmall tractors,
and I can be interested in both with, you know, no shame at all.
-Good. -But another point --
I mean, a very interesting,
and this is about unintended consequences,
and "The Eyre Affair" which is --
which I kind of think of sort of juvenilia.
It was me just mucking around
as a very, you know, young writer.
Not a particularly young person, but a very young writer,
and just mucking around
and having fun with this and being silly.
And what I found, rather delightfully,
is that people arrive with "The Eyre Affair"
because they're interested, someone said,
"Oh, there's a good time travel story in there,"
or a good story about -- it's a good silly fantasy or whatever,
or it's got dodos.
And I've had people arrive in it, you know,
for one reason and then gone,
"Well, do you know, this 'Jane Eyre' --
I've never read 'Jane Eyre,'
and maybe I should read 'Jane Eyre.'"
And they did, and they loved it, and they thought,
"Okay, I think the classics aren't so bad after all.
So maybe I'll read a few more."
And, you know, "What are featured in Jasper's books?
Let's just look at those."
And all of a sudden, you know,
you're doing "Oliver Twist," you know,
or "Wuthering Heights" or something.
And for me, that was --
I really liked that, you know, that this --
it was like a sort of story Grand Central.
You come in on one train and leave on another,
and I kind of like that.
And it's always nice to hear from readers
when they say that.
-And I think that that world that you created
for the "Eyre Affair" books,
where books are so central, you know?
They're the world, really.
And the way you explain -- Yeah, you know --
you know, Jasper, I'm a huge fan of your books.
Whatever. -Yeah.
-Do you think that they would ever --
So, you were in film. You did movie stuff, film stuff.
-Yeah.
-Do you think these would ever be filmed,
and would they have to use CGI and all of that?
Or could they...?
-What, the Thursday books?
-Yeah. Or the "Shades of Grey" books.
-"Shades of Grey," it would be difficult
because it's kind of everyone's perception
and telling a movie in point of V, a POV,
you know, your point of view, would be an interesting idea.
So, you would just see it, literally, as someone's POV,
and then you'd turn to someone else's POV,
and they would see the different colors.
I think it would be difficult...
If it was a book that had sold, like, you know,
25 million copies, and everyone kind of knew what it was about,
even if they hadn't read it, much like, you know,
the Harry Potter series, then I think it would be a lot easier.
But I think selling that to a very cautious producer
would be immensely hard.
-Right. -Immensely hard.
-But the Thursday Next books, there you have a heroine and...
-Yeah. Possibly. Yeah. I don't know.
I kind of feel slightly that the Thursday Next books are --
because they're books about stories and stories about books,
I think they're kind of for us, you know, readers?
-Yeah. Okay.
-And I think that once a film company got ahold of --
a film crew got ahold of it,
a film production company got ahold of it,
that they'd want to change it.
And I think the best Thursday Next film
would be a story about a character
who travels into movies... -Yeah.
-...and then you would see them in the back of movies.
-Right.
-And, you know, creeping around whilst,
you know, the movie was happening behind them,
slightly like "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."
-Right. Right. -Which was, you know,
Tom Stoppard's brilliant piece of theater and film.
So, I think that would probably be the way to do it.
-Oh. Okay.
-I'm not sure it would work, really.
-And -- Okay. Sad to say,
because I think -- I'm not a big movie person,
but I would love to see the way
that world of Thursday Next is portrayed.
That would be fun visually.
Yeah.
And I have become pretty addicted to audio books.
Are you an audio person at all?
-Yes, totally.
Well, I was -- I am, actually.
I'm an undiagnosed dyslexic, right?
And I only found this out within the last 10 years.
So, I didn't know that everybody else
had so much trouble reading books as I did.
And, of course, when you find out
you're dyslexic and you never knew, of course,
everything becomes crystal clear and you understand.
Suddenly you go, "Oh, God."
And someone said to me, "Oh, dyslexic, really?
So you read on audio then?"
And I went, "Well, no.
But I'm certainly going to give it a whirl."
And I do all my reading on audio now...
-Wow. -...and I love it. You know?
-Yeah. Yes. -It's so good.
And when anyone says, "Oh, well, if it's audio it's not reading,"
it's like, "No, it is reading."
-Right. -It's totally reading.
Yeah. I mean, I wish I'd known that 30 years ago,
and I would have written -- read, sorry --
you know, twice as many books as I have now.
So, yeah. Audio. I love audio.
-Do you have a desire to read the --
to do the reading, you know,
the audio books of your books, reading the audio books?
-Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't mind.
I think probably voice actors
actually are sort of trained in this
and a bit better at it.
I mean, I think I could do it.
But what's interesting about audio is
it's an industry that hasn't changed for many, many years.
And now, they're trying to push the envelope
and sort of just change things around a bit.
So, in the audio of "Red Side Story,"
I read out the chapter headings.
And in the last of my Dragonslayer series,
which is "The Last Great Troll War" --
"The Last Troll War" --
I actually read the last section of it,
because it's in a different voice.
It's no longer first-person narrative Jennifer.
It's in a different voice.
And they said, "Look, why don't you do this?
Because then you can be telling the story
and you're the narrator."
And I'm going, "Oh, my God, that's so brilliant.
Yes. Perfect."
And then also, again, they got in touch,
Soho Press, who are publishing me
in the States now, and I love them.
They're just such a lovely company.
-I love them, too.
-Oh, yeah. They're just so good.
So nice to work with, nothing's too much trouble,
nothing's difficult. They're just great.
And so, they said, "Look, can we do --
can we do a bonus chapter for the US edition?"
I went, "Yeah. Sure. But I'll do something a bit different,"
because I always like to do that,
and I did something a bit different.
And it wasn't something that you could easily make into an audio.
So, they said, "Look, audio,
you know, is there something we could do?
Do you have any ideas for audio?"
And I said, "Okay. Well, I'll write a two-hander, right?
And then you either can get voice actors
to do it in the States, or me and my friend Brenden,
who's a comedian, we can do it here."
And that's what we did.
So, at the end of the audio,
"Red Side Story," for the US edition,
there is me and my friend Brenden
doing a little two-handed playlet...
-Oh, wow.
-...which is only for US audio listeners.
-Okay.
-And I like that about, you know, the audio,
we're doing this and, you know,
getting authors involved to write stuff and to do extras
and maybe even do some voice...
-Yeah. Because I got to read my novel.
You know, when it came out in 2017,
that's one of the things I really wanted to do,
because I felt like I was the narrator of the novel.
I was the one telling the story, even though it wasn't me,
but, I mean, I was the one telling the story,
and so, you know, my agent worked it out
so that I got to read it.
So, that was really -- I loved that, actually.
-Yeah. -Such a ham that I am.
Jasper... [ Both laugh ]
Jasper, thank you so much for joining us today,
and "Shades of Grey," "Red Side Story,"
and can't wait for the third one.
Thank you. -Thank you so much.
It's been really, really great. Thank you.
♪♪