Movie Review: Winnie the Pooh (2011)

Winnie the Pooh (2011) - directed by Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall

I never read the Winnie the Pooh books as a kid. There's no rhyme or reason for my neglect, I just didn't read them. Last year, though, I finally read the first book in the series simply titled Winnie-the-Pooh and I fell in love with it. There's something about the lightness, the emphasis on language, and the characters that makes for a truly wonderful reading experience. It is the definition of delightful. But would that translate to the modern cinema where the bombast of Transformers 3 and Harry Potter 7.2 rule the day? The answer, gladly, gloriously, is yes.

Nothing of any real consequence happens in Winnie the Pooh. We find the titular Bear of Very Little Brain waking up and listening to his grumbly tummy. This Pooh needs some Hunny. So he sets off to find some. Along the way he finds his sad friend Eeyore (voiced marvelously by Bud Luckey, recently Chuckles the clown in Toy Story 3) who has lost his tale. The rest of the film follows Pooh and his friends as they first try to replace Eeyore's tail and then try to rescue Christopher Robin (their best friend and the boy who makes everything happen) from the great and terrible Backson. Most of the film, though, just allows us to spend some time with the denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood. And what a time it is. The songs are simply charming, including the best scene of the film: Owl's explanation of all the hideous things that Backsons do, like sneaking into your library and scribbling in your books and putting holes in your socks and steal your youth, all illustrated in the style of chalk on blackboard. Owl is played by Craig Ferguson and he's the standout actor in the film, filling the boastful bird with such pomposity and silliness that you can't help but love him.

Really everything about this movie works. The writing is filled with the same love of words and language that permeates the books (I will never not love the device of the characters interacting with the words that are telling the story they are taking part in) and the narrator (John Cleese, another bit of brilliant casting) lovingly pushes Pooh along his small journey. I just used the word "love" three times in one sentence. Can you tell that I enjoyed this film? There's a part when all of our friends are trapped down a pit except for the not-so-brave Piglet who doesn't know how to tie a knot which leads to the best rapid-fire dialogue since His Girl Friday. Yes, parts of the film live up to the great screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s. Winnie the Pooh doesn't have a whole bunch to say. Pooh learns a bit of a lesson by the end, but only just. And I doubt it will spark the kinds of deep conversations that a film like The Tree of Life does. It will, however, hold the honor of being my favorite film of 2011, kicking that movie with the dinosaurs and coming of age in the 50s down a peg. There's a lot to be said for a film that exists solely to delight us. It will instill a lasting sense of happiness in anybody that watches it. Winnie the Pooh is a force for good, spreading cheer and wonder wherever it goes.

P.S. The music in the film is also great. Zooey Deschanel provides a new version of the theme song and a couple other tracks and Henry Jackman's score fits the world perfectly. It's obvious that, with Deschanel's involvement and the trailer featuring Somewhere Only We Know by Keane, Disney wants people older than 5 to watch this film. I'm a 23 year old male that loves Winnie the Pooh and I hope that everybody would be as open to such a magical film.

Book Review: Embassytown by China Miéville

Embassytown by China Miéville

This latest book by the British sci-fi phenom is a special blending of his superb urban fantasy world building techniques and a didactic pondering on what it means to speak and to be heard. Most of the book exists in a kind of inbetween state, it could be told in a short story and get all the plot in there pretty easily. But doing so would limit what makes Miéville such an interesting writer. Before this book he's created several versions of London: Bas-Lag, a world that mixes old-school magic and new-school technology, the mixed cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, the place where all of London's disused goods go to live a second life, and a London controlled by various factions and cults and religions, each praying to a different god and working towards a different apocalypse. Embassytown is the first book where he moves beyond alterations of London and into an entirely alien world. The planet is far on the outer edges of explored space, the natives are strange to the point where they don't even recognize humans as beings, and the little human outpost in the middle of the alien city has come under siege by aliens craving a new drug.

There's a complex situation going on (so complex that, should I put the book down for any given amount of time, it took a bit to readjust into such an alien landscape) involving the Hosts (aliens) which speak with two mouths and can only say absolute truths. They throw lying competitions to see who can get closest to telling a not-truth. They use humans and objects as similes to talk about other things. They can only communicate with humans through Ambassadors (twins that, through some technology, are able to sync their thoughts and speak with two voices to say one thing) until a new Ambassador shows up that isn't twins and whose speech becomes a drug to the Hosts. After all of this gets set into motion - and it takes a bit to get there, and a bit to understand what's going on in the first place - not much happens until the last 50 or so pages of the book. There's a term Miéville invents for people that just kind of do what they need to do to get by, no more and no less, "floaking." Our hero, Avice, a woman born on this alien outpost who gets away and returns for love, is a master floaker and as she goes so goes the narrative. The middle 150 pages meander as one person dies but is replaced and the situation just gets a bit worse every day. Of course, all of this floaking around serves a greater purpose, developing the idea of Language and language.

The fundamental difference between the humans and the Hosts is their inability to understand each other. This can, of course, operate as a metaphor for people's general lack of communication but there is so much more Miéville wants to say. The Hosts speak Language with their dual mouths and similes like "The Girl Who was Hurt in Darkness and Ate What was Given to Her," (this being Avice, who, as a child, was taken and beat and then fed because the Hosts can't say something that isn't explicitly true) and are trapped within this shell of absolute literalness. When a flawed speaker, the new Ambassador, is introduced and seemingly speaks with not one mind but two the Hosts are literally drugged. One of the best aspects of the book is how Miéville describes the descent of the Hosts into their addiction. Because the entire city is bioengineered to be partially living even the houses fall prey to the language-drug. If the people, Host and human alike, are to be saved there must be a paradigm shift away from the exacting nature of Language and into the glorious complexity of language. 

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

The book really comes into its own when Avice figures out that the similes must be transformed into metaphors. Instead of the Hosts being like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her they must be the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her. It's the difference between being "cool as ice" and "ice cold". By drawing such attention to this seemingly insignificant idiosyncrasy of our language Miéville expounds in great detail how important it is to communicate and understand language. Everything means something and by paying attention to how we say something we can better utilize our language to mean exactly what we want to mean. Exactly because we can lie by saying we are an emotional wreck (taking the visceral reaction to a car accident and applying it to our inner self) we are able to say so much more than talking in plain truth would allow. That breakthrough is presented wonderfully in the book and works both intellectually and emotionally. The previous floaking allows for the full impact in both head and heart of the revelation and switch between simile and metaphor. 

END THE SPOILERS!

While this book isn't nearly as exciting as, say, Kraken nor as wild a ride as Perdido Street Station, I think that Mieville has something important to say which, for the first time, aligns perfectly with the created world and the characters and the emotions they stir within the reader. It's the first time everything works, I'd say. I probably would, however, not go to it for a re-read any time soon. It doesn't have the almost Indiana Jones-y nature which will propel the reader back into its world over and over again, unlike those two books I listed earlier in this paragraph. There's just something missing which keeps this book from being his best, even though all the pieces work better than they have in his previous books. I'd probably call it "fun."

Book Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

I've cried plenty of times at movies, songs, and even TV shows. They're able to reach that level where the emotions are high enough quickly and effectively through the combination of sound and (in the case of movies and TV) pictures. It almost seems like cheating. A book has never made me cry though a few have come close, including Roald Dahl's Danny the Champion of the World and Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. But for whatever reason they never quite reached that point to turn words into tears. It's probably not their fault, I don't blame them any. It has as much to do with my investment as it does with the quality of the writing. There's just something about the way books work which makes it harder for me to get attached enough to shed a tear. All of this was true until I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book about a young boy dealing with his father's death on 9/11 and looking for a lock to match a key. There was not one but two moments in the book that made me cry in addition to the countless others where I laughed and exclaimed in shock. What I'm saying is that this books is not only extremely well written and incredibly emotional but that those two combine to vault it into my short list of the best books I've ever read. 

Before September 11th, 2001, Oskar Schell's life seemed to be pretty great. A loving mom and dad and grandma and an active imagination would provide him with a pretty idyllic childhood had his father not died on that horrible day. But after that day he withdraws into himself and invents gadgets like a microphone that projects everybody's heartbeats so that they would eventually sync with each other and everybody could be together in that way. He is, understandably, devastated. Then he finds a key hidden in an envelope with the word "Black" written on it. He goes on a quest through the five (or is it six?) boroughs of New York City to find the lock that the key will unlock and maybe put an end to his grief about his father's untimely and unexpected death. Sprinkled throughout his story we get the story of his grandfather and grandmother (his dad's parents) and why they could never quite work out how to live with each other. This part, told through their autobiographies and diaries, contains the first moment that made me cry. When the grandfather leaves his wife after she told him she was pregnant he brings her two hands closer and closer and closer to each other until there was but a "dictionary page's width" between them. This wordless (he lost his ability - or will -  to speak after the emotional trauma of the Dresden firebombings so vividly captured here and in Slaughterhouse-5) expression of a love that almost was but could never be is so well conceived that I had to stop reading for the night and wipe away some tears. The second moment comes when Oskar reaches the end of his quest. It's oddly anticlimactic in a plot sense but the way that scene incorporates the father-son theme that runs throughout the book is what earns the waterworks. 

There are also a few moments where Oskar believes certain happenings to be about one thing which are later revealed to be about something else entirely that are both shocking and enlightening. Much like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, there's a sense of the age-old idea that "all of this has happened before and will happen again." There are echoes and reverberations throughout the novel, even in some of the photographic imagery that is incorporated (mostly as a part of Oskar's book of Things That Happened To Me) the lock and key being of great importance along with the power of books, writing, and words along with the difficulty of using them to communicate. At one point the type runs together for pages because Oskar's grandfather runs out of paper to write on but must continue to write. It's a powerful image that is more than just gimmickry that some have called it out for. In fact, this book has received some not-insignificant amount of criticism. This piece encompasses most of the criticisms the book has endured, including the lack of originality and the precious nature of the characters/story/style. And the thing is that I can't really argue against that article because it's mostly right. The style is different from the normal novel. The characters are more like fairy tale characters dealing with real issues than fully real people. And it's not really original. Nobody will deny that it is just taking things that worked from others and incorporating them into this story. What I will deny is that all of these things are bad. All too often we require our art to be developed in a void where nothing else can possibly influence the artist. Does it really matter if this story was told by somebody else about some other happening and in some other way? Not if this one works. Please do identify sources but don't become beholden to them. Steal as long as you do something with your stolen goods. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close does plenty with its pieces, whether they were stolen or sprung fully formed from Foer's head. That's all that matters.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Name of the Wind owes a lot to Harry Potter. There's the school for learning magic, the dead parents, the snooty aristocrat arch rival, the wandering Big Bad enemy, the teacher with a grudge against our hero and the teacher with loopy but seemingly knowledgeable insights, and there's the girl that is kinda strange but makes a connection with Kvothe, the hero of the tale. Yes, there's a lot of overlap there but what The Name of the Wind does with these characters and ideas (which I recognize weren't exactly invented for the Harry Potter universe but the popular girl get's all the dirty looks, I guess) makes it a great story. This, the first book in the Kingkiller Chronicle series does a lot of heavy lifting as we hear about the first 15 years of Kvothe's (pronounced like "quoth") life. The framing story is a clever conceit in this tale because the Kvothe we know in the present is quite different from the Kvothe at the beginning of his life (and he doesn't even come close to old Kvothe's melancholy by the end of this book, the first day of his recitation of his life). We know Kvothe will end up as an innkeeper and bartender somewhere in the middle of nowhere hiding from his previous life as a hero but as of the end of this book he's still riding pretty high. Only at the end of the book do we get a hint of what happened to him to turn him against the world when his two audience members - one a faerie and the other an author recording Kvothe's tale of woe - have a midnight conversation about how sad Kvothe has become in his later years. It's a telling scene and told well as we get some talk of masks that would please Oscar Wilde.

The book moves at a quick pace (I finished the 672 pages in around a week and a half) and is well written, though there are a few issues. At this point in the story young Kvothe is a little too good at everything. Much of the middle of the book throws a bunch of seemingly minor issues at him which he solves quite easily. Part of his myth is that he can do everything and I guess that is on display here but it makes for a kind of uninteresting story at points. There's a lot of wheel spinning without much meaning outside of a couple of great scenes in the middle bits (the fire in the workshop and Kvothe's performance of a long and complicated song stand out as being particularly great). The last 100-150 pages, though, are stellar.

Perhaps the element that separates The Name of the Wind from Harry Potter the most is the love interest. I never really got anything from Harry's various romantic entaglements and in fact I thought he probably should have hooked up with Luna Lovegood because she was clearly the coolest of the girls hanging around Hogwarts. Kvothe's object of desire is Denna and she is a perfect match for him. They meet early on but the relationship only really gets going in the middle of the book. Denna, like Kvothe, has a mysterious past and nobody to rely on for food or money or shelter. Where these circumstances propelled Kvothe to become a master arcanist (magician, basically) they pushed Denna to a largely nomadic lifestyle, living off the attention she gets from men of all ages while never getting close to anybody for too long. She's an incredible alluring character and whenever she's around Kvothe can't help but admire her and the reader will likely follow his lead. The end of the book concerns a possible attack by the creatures that killed Kvothe's entire troupe of traveling performers. This drives Kvothe to the scene of a wedding day massacre where he finds that Denna is the only survivor. There's a lot of fun interaction between the two as they spend more time with each other than either has spent with another person for quite a while. The relationship grows as they find out why the Chandrian attacked this particular group of people and what attention they have brought on the little town. It's one big setpiece which includes a dragon and a harvest-time celebration. It's supremely well written and gives me hope for the next books in the series. Let's hope they spend more time on heroic antics rather than finding enough money to pay for another semester at school. One of these things is way more exciting and, though the other is important background information, I hope it has come to an end. This is a series with epic inclinations and if it can capitalize on those it could end up being one of the best series in the genre, if not the modern era.

Film Review: Bill Cunningham New York

Bill Cunningham New York - Directed by Richard Press

As photographers Bill Cunningham and I could not be any more opposite each other. Where he takes pictures of people in New York City from the streets to high fashion shows in order to capture trends and patterns in the world of clothing I focus on nature and the way the world works with itself. Where Cunningham is widely respected and works for the Gray Lady I wallow in obscurity and have never sold a photograph. Cunningham seemingly has no care for composition, his NYT spreads often seem like a cluttered mishmash of people with little to no context outside of a couple of words and the detail that he is focusing on in any given collection. I would dare to say that most of Cunningham's collections would not be found on the walls of anybody's homes. They work quite well in the context of his weekly spreads highlighting certain trends on the streets of NYC or the fashion of charitable galas or the wearability of fashion show clothes but few of them are "great" photos of their own accord. Bill's photos might not be "art" but he is certainly an artist.

It's telling that there is a documentary about Bill Cunningham. What he does is, as one of the talking heads points out, practically war journalism. Instead of taking pictures of the ravages of war Bill focuses his camera on the ordinary (low hanging jeans and knee length skirts) and the extraordinary (strange high heels and even stranger patterns) in the urban jungle. He just looks at things, all things, and finds what people are wearing in any given week. It's a talent and a skill and an essential part of his voice as an artist. Everybody in the fashion scene, from designers to magazine moguls, knows and loves Bill because he notices what's working almost instantly. In a telling segment of the film he sits on the side of a fashion runway in Paris and we see him begin to lift his camera only to put it down again when he recognizes that nobody would possibly wear a piece on a real street. If real people aren't wearing the clothes he's not interested. It is this singular focus that makes Bill a true artist. It matters little if the photos are singularly meritorious, it's what he does with his entire oeuvre that's the key.

Now that we've established why Bill works as a documentary subject and an artist let's talk about the film itself. It mimics, in its way, Bill's own approach. We see all the kinds of things that Bill does from walking/riding through the streets of NYC to attending galas (his method of choosing which of the myriad galas to shoot comes down to which charity he deems best) to deciding which pictures to use and pestering his art director/assistant as they work on the layout of the spreads. Each aspect shows us a bit more about Bill and confirming what we've learned before. At the beginning we see a nice older man who grew up in the 60s and 70s New York art scene and has found himself as a kind of establishment still. Then we learn about his steadfast policy of not taking payment or even free food while he's working in order to keep absolutely unencumbered. We then find that he is one of the last few remaining tenants of the Carnegie Hall studios which at one time housed people like Marlon Brando and Leonard Bernstein and now gives roof to a few old eccentrics (Editta Sherman has been living there for 58 years and is one of the more interesting interview subjects in the film) who are reluctant to leave. Each new segment shows a bit more of Bill and the life he has built, but all is not happiness and sunshine. 

In bits and pieces we see that Cunningham is, perhaps, not exactly happy with his religion and at the end of the film the director asks him two questions point blank: how have sex and religion shaped your life? Bill answers the first part deftly, asking whether the real question is if he is gay or straight and manages to not really give an answer until he is asked the second part. There he pauses and looks down at his lap. There is real humanity in this moment and I give great credit to Richard Press (the director) for asking the question and letting it play out in a medium shot. A lesser director might cut to a close up or a different angle but Press keeps the entire interview in an off centered medium shot that allows Cunningham the space to be himself. The little coda after this moment in the film just returns to Bill's exploration of the streets. We see him from a distance and as he observes the world we observe him, knowing more and yet still not everything about the man. What was just a guy taking pictures at the beginning of the film has transformed into an artist creating and defining the world through his own lens. In that way he can serve as an inspiration to any artist. Even if we don't share subjects or techniques or values there is still so much to learn from Bill Cunningham. He's a man who takes pictures of clothes and the people who wear them yet has no pretense of being fashionable himself. His blue workman jacket is more function than form and that dichotomy between subject and artist is the defining element of the film. Bill's modesty only serves to highlight the extravagance of the fashion world and the "exotic birds of paradise" whom he captures on film reveal the true nature of the man behind the camera.

Movie Review: 127 Hours by Danny Boyle

127 Hours by Danny Boyle

I can see why this film draws comparisons to 2010's Buried. Each tells the tale of a man trapped in a very confined space and follows them as they deal with their situations and their own mortality. Where Buried focuses more on the plight of the man in the moment (Ryan Reynolds in that film) 127 Hours examines how the man got there and what it will take for him to get out (James Franco in an astounding performance that would likely have won all of the awards this season if it weren't for that pesky Colin Firth). It is this fundamental difference that makes 127 Hours a compelling and intriguing story told in a fascinating manner.



Most know the story of Aron Ralston. He was a weekend warrior who, while on a climbing/hiking/biking expedition, got trapped between a rock and another, larger rock. He's stuck there for, well, 127 hours until he realizes that the only way he will live is if he cuts off his own arm. This true story precedes everybody's moviegoing experience and it looms large over the film. Much like Titanic and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, we know how this film ends. Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, Sunshine) knows this and decides to focus instead on everything but that. There's a point early in the film where Aron tries to cut into his arm with a dull knife. It hardly makes a scratch. Now we know that it will take a heck of a lot of doing to fully de-limb himself and while Ralston tries everything under the sun to escape we know that every second ticks closer to the inevitable unpleasantness. That's good tension building. That's good filmmaking.

Of course, that's not the only good thing that Boyle does. His films have always had a kind of crazy kineticism that ensures the audience won't get bored or tune out. His films demand your attention and this one is no different. Strangely, though I wished that Buried stuck closer to the coffin which imprisoned its protagonist, I was glad that we got plenty of flashbacks and hallucinations while Ralston was stuck in his gorge. In addition to allowing Boyle to work his movie magic we also got to know Aron a lot better than we might have had we stuck with him through the entirety of the film. We see his family and we see how he keeps them - along with the rest of the world - at arms length. His predicament allows for a lot of self reflection and in a touching and fresh and real scene he apologizes for being a huge jerk. It's not often that a movie has enough guts to condemn its own hero. Once Ralston realizes that he is the only person that got him into the situation he knows that he's the only one to get him out of it. And then comes the arm amputation.

The big scene comes at the very end of the film, as you would expect. It's an intense scene to be sure and, much like Tarantino's deft use of sound and camera trickery in Reservoir Dogs' ear cutting scene, Boyle shows a lot with a little. That's not to say that there isn't blood and gore. It's all there, but Boyle's energy carries us through and saves us some grossness by cutting or moving away just as the worst bits happen. It's the Jaws rule, we always imagine worse than they can show us. After Aron sets himself free there is a moment to breathe then the movie rushes back into top gear, this time with the greatest joy and zest for life that only one who has been trapped for more than five days and then escapes truly knows. The final ten or fifteen minutes of this movie are practically perfect in the ride they take the audience on. It's a true examination of the human spirit, one that understands the ups and downs, the good and the bad, the self-centered and codependent nature of man. It's a film that, by showing the truly horrible things we must sometimes do, encourages us to be the best we can be.

Book Review: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman made his name with the His Dark Materials series of kid lit. That series is, for me, among the best of the kid lit genre, if not the entirety of literature. He gets so much heart and so many ideas out of a really interesting idea. It did, however, inspire a lot of controversy among those in the religious community. In Pullman's follow-up book he doesn't shy away from that controversy. He full on embraces it.

TGMJatSC (which is a long title even when abbreviated!) is a retelling of the story of Jesus with a couple of twists thrown in, the most important of which is Jesus' twin brother, Christ. Jesus follows his path as we know it and his brother follows him around to record his deeds. But he doesn't just record the "history", he records the "truth". For example, the "feeding the multitude" story is really Jesus' generosity and hospitality inspiring the rest of the crowd to share their food, thus multiplying the food in a figurative sense if not a miraculous one. It is only in the recording of this story by Christ that the miracle appears fully formed so that Jesus literally feeds thousands of people with only a few fish and loaves of bread.

The idea that Pullman is getting at throughout this book is that Jesus never wanted an entire religion and church to be built around him. During his forty days in the wilderness it's not the Devil but Christ who comes and tempts him with the idea of fame and everlasting reverence. When Jesus rejects this Christ is approached by an "angel" - who is never identified but might be a certain fallen one - and is set the task of following Jesus around and recording not what happened but what should have happened. He's making a story here and he is free to warp and exaggerate what Jesus does and say in order to later use him as the foundation of Christianity. This can be best seen in the Sermon on the Mount segment (and they really are segments. Pullman writes the book as if it were one of the books of the Bible and his short chapters with clipped writing do well to get the reader in the feel of those books.) where Jesus uses phrases like "yakkety yak" and "blah blah blah" with Christ resolving to edit them later to seem more Messiah-worthy.

This book is short (I read it in a couple of hours) and the ideas presented within are really interesting to consider. A religious person will get as much out of it as a non-religious person because the story of Christ writing "truth" instead of "history" can be expanded to the act of storytelling in general. Late last year and continuing into this one there has been a lot of talk about The Social Network, a film that has dubious ties to reality but tells a compelling story. Here Pullman argues that it's not the thing that happened which matters but what it means and what we can learn from it. This book shows us what "actually happened" and our collective knowledge tells us the "truth" of the situation. As the great John Ford film says, "When fact becomes legend, print the legend."

Book Review: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde.

This book (thankfully denoted as "A Novel" for those of us that don't know how books work) is a departure from Jasper Fforde's popular Thrusday Next series. Instead of being based on an alternate England where literature crosses over with reality, Shades of Grey is the story of an alternate England where color perception denotes your social standing. There is a Colortocracy in place and it ensures that everybody is kept in their right place. Purples (those that can see, well, purple) are at an almost religious position and Greys are of such little importance that they don't even have to follow the Law of Munsell, the man that instated the Colortocracy after the Something That Happened. All of this is to say that it's kind of like a typical utopia/dystopia story like 1984, A Brave New World or Brazil. Everything seems pleasant at the beginning but the reader slowly learns about the way the world works and that it may be more sinister than we initially thought.

Ever since the 1-2 punch that is 1984 and A Brave New World there hasn't been much new in the way of dystopian fiction. They all follow the same pattern so you pretty much know what you're getting into story-wise. Luckily Fforde realizes this and makes the world more important than the story, at least in this first (and - so far - only) book in the trilogy. He throws the reader right into the middle of the action and begins by slinging terms like "wrongspotted" and "National Color" around with little explanation of what exactly those terms mean. He builds upon these terms and we soon realize that each person can see only one or two colors naturally and that the hero, Eddie Russet, is a pretty high perceiving Red. That he can see so much red makes him desirable to some and a threat to others in the Outer Fringes town he is sent to as a punishment for trying to improve line-queuing. This is a society where the Laws of Munsell are king and only through clever loopholery can on improve the way things work. In fact, through successive Leapbacks most technology and art have been destroyed in order to create a streamlined society so that the people can focus on chromatic improvement.

If all of this seems like a lot of ideas and no story you're kind of right. The book takes place over the course of a week or so and much of it is just Russet going around and figuring out how the town works and falling in love with a Grey named Jane. But he can't marry her because marrying for love and not chromatic improvement is the silliest of follies. Everything is done to set up your next generation to be of a higher perception. Fforde brings the lighthearted clever prose the Thursday Next series was known for over to this one and it's a good thing he does. The weight of explaining all of the new concepts here and telling the story might have been too much for the book to handle without the little laughs we get as the characters root around an abandoned city for spoons (which, of course, have postal codes on them which, of course, have been rendered close to useless through various Leapbacks that have all but destroyed the Postal Service as we know it) and marriage brackets and pools much like those that pop up at the beginning of every sports tournament. It's a clever book that moves quickly through its 400 pages thanks to Fforde's writing and plotting.

Of course, this is the beginning of a trilogy of books. As such there's a lot of build up and only a little payoff. I suspect that, much like the Lord of the Rings books, this first section's climax will look small in comparison to the end of the trilogy as a whole. That's not to say that Shades of Grey's Balrog fight isn't exciting. The climax brings several relationships to a head as well as opens the world wide open. Some things are explained but have little impact as of right now but seem like they will be of great importance later in the series. I'm alright with this as long as the payoff actually happens. As is the last section is much more exciting than the previous 300 pages and really sets up the rest of the series quite well. The book is certainly worth a read for those that like clever dystopian futures and fun - if a little light - writing. And, if you're not down with the French language, here's a little hint:

retroussé (comparative more retroussé, superlative most retroussé)

1. Turned up, as in describing the nose.