Summary:
This is the second time I have read this book and it just keeps getting better and better. I now have my own copy so I can read it as many times as I want. Before, I had borrowed this one from the library. I wanted my own copy and finally found one at The Book Warehouse, a small chain of book stores, which offers some awesome prices.
This book is so very interesting because it takes something we’ve all read about a dystopian world and presents it in an unusual and somewhat comical way.
Imagine a world where you can only see one color naturally and any other colors must be synthesized in order for you to see them. Imagine that your clothes are regulated, you’re not supposed to use certain words, people are divided into classes depending on what color they can see, you have no choice of your job, people marry in order for their color lines to get better, and the things we do now have been erased.
Eddie Russet has been sent to a small village on the edge of known civilization. The date is far into the future many, many years. Eddie has been punished for playing a prank and is sentenced to complete a chair census. Yes, quite pointless indeed .
His father is the new swatchman of East Carmine. Swatchman doesn’t mean electrician, cook, or some sort of fabric guru, it means the doctor. By some strange happening, people have developed to only be able to see certain colors and can be medically treated with swatches of various colors.Quite interesting. I, myself, as an artist, find this view fascinating. Anyways, so Eddie’s in this new town where the rules are not as respected as where he came from.
Strange things start to happen almost the very second he has arrived. A yellow tells him to snitch on him to the prefects, the rulers of the village. One of the prefects takes his return ticket. An old woman tries to sell him a cherry cake that isn’t really cherry, at a very high price.
Perhaps the strangest thing , is before Eddie ever arrived in East Carmine there was an incident in a paint shop. There was a girl there and that same girl was now in the village of East Carmine. How did she get there? She wasn’t on the train. In these days, hardly any cars exist, there aren’t planes and boats aren’t going around in the ocean. The only real means of transportation is the train.
Oh yea, everyone is deathly afraid of lightning and swans.
Another strange thing about this time in the future is every living creature has somehow been modified to carry a bar code, even the people. They also practice a barbaric tradition of scarring their addresses into their collar bones, weird!
Eddie senses something weird is going on and soon finds out more than he ever wished to know. He doesn’t find out the answers to all of his questions, but his eyes are opened. The governing force isn’t as friendly as they make out to be, are they ever?
The people in this book call us the previous. We left behind cars and houses and great technology, but the collective, as it’s called, choose to abandon certain technologies every few years, even bicycles. They don’t know why we disappeared or what happened to us.
The book takes place over four days. There is a lot to be crammed into those four days, but it is well worth the read.
What I liked: I really like the concept presented in the book. I generally like dystopian books, and this one has a completely different spin on the whole thing. It was clever of Fforde to divide people not on the color of their skin, but the color they could see.
I would also like to think that Fforde takes into account some sort of genetic engineering, I mean how else could you get a bar code on a person?
Ffrode takes a struggle as old as civilization itself and projects it into the future. That struggle is of some people to be equal and some people to be better. Ffrode takes the general concept of something like socialism and puts it into play here in his book. The people are generally supposed to be equal, but there are rules that shift other people into being more equal or privileged. This struggle is something that is always going to go on. There are many humans who would like to think that people could live equally, and there are some that can for quite a while, but then someone finds a way to be better and things take off from there. It is currently not in human nature to be equal unto everyone else, nor should people really be that way. If we were all equal we would have the same thoughts, same education, and same background. No one would ever think of anything new. We would never advance. That is what Fforde points out in this book.
This society in this book, the collective, praises people who are the middle of the road. They don’t praise people who actually think about things and create new products and ways of doing things, they praise those who are thoroughly in the middle. Eddie soon finds out that he isn’t being punished for playing a prank, he was being punished for thinking.
Punishment for thinking is a well-known concept in any dystopian book. It’s also something that has happened in this past in our history. Think Galileo. Got it? Or maybe, the Inquisition. It’s something that has happened in our past and will be doomed to happen again in the future at some point and as a result writers write about people being punished for thought.
I actually see a little of this today. Sometimes I really can’t stand the current public school system. It seems that only children of a certain ability are catered to and the top part and the bottom part are left behind. I know there is a “no child left behind act” but seriously, that doesn’t work.
I know I have talked about this before, but let’s discuss it a little more. Sometimes people praise stupidity or lack of effort. I’ve seen it happen, it happens everyday. I’ve heard groups of people laugh, laugh mind you,about not being able to do algebra. I’ve heard of kids who are nerdy, I’m sorry to use the term, being made fun of because they look at the world differently. It’s sad. At one point in history great thinkers were praised and everyone strived to gain knowledge, but these days those who strive for knowledge are called geeks and nerds. We all love Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, but how many of you would pursue his same field or try to learn some of the things he knows? Granted he’s an imaginary character, but why not strive to learn more? Education is important and it’s not necessarily the education that you get along with everyone else that is important, it’s the education that you get on your own that is really important.
What I didn’t like: I really like this book, so there’s not much that I didn’t like. I don’t like that the sequel isn’t out yet. I read this book a while back and the second one still isn’t out. Where is it at I want to read it?! Hurry up Jasper!
I think some illustrations could have really gave the book a little something extra, but the author does have some illustrations on his website which you can view of various creatures in the book. It’s a nice little view of his thoughts. I encourage you to visit his website.
This book is just a great, great book.
One-Eleven Books2 