Early Riser – Jasper Fforde (Book Review)

This months Book Club book: Jasper Fforde’s latest standalone novel, Early Riser:

Every Winter, the human population hibernates.

During those bitterly cold four months, the nation is a snow-draped landscape of desolate loneliness, and devoid of human activity.

Well, not quite.

Your name is Charlie Worthing and it’s your first season with the Winter Consuls, the committed but mildly unhinged group of misfits who are responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses.

You are investigating an outbreak of viral dreams which you dismiss as nonsense; nothing more than a quirky artefact borne of the sleeping mind.

When the dreams start to kill people, it’s unsettling.

When you get the dreams too, it’s weird.

When they start to come true, you begin to doubt your sanity.

But teasing truth from Winter is never easy: You have to avoid the Villains and their penchant for murder, kidnapping and stamp collecting, ensure you aren’t eaten by Nightwalkers whose thirst for human flesh can only be satisfied by comfort food, and sidestep the increasingly less-than-mythical WinterVolk.

But so long as you remember to wrap up warmly, you’ll be fine.

The book follows Charlie Worthing, a recent transfer to the Winter Consul – a group whose responsibility it is to protect the many whilst they hibernate over winter. Winter in the book reaches around -40C and below, so survival is low and provision must be made.

This alternate earth struggles to maintain the population, until the recent pharmaceutical success of Morphenox, enabling sleepers to save energy which otherwise would be used on dreaming. Only, are the side effects worth it?

Charlie spends his first winter meeting a lot of strange characters and unravelling a mystery he was never supposed to uncover.

The book has moments of tension with often a creepy atmosphere, mixed with a subtle humour not uncommon to Fforde’s writing. The characters throughout are fairly well developed though some admittedly forgettable.

This book was reminiscent of Shades of Grey – the drug which helps people sleep being expensive meant that the upper classes had a much higher chance of survival, those who were unable to shamed for the ability to dream, all pointing towards a dystopian class system. However I enjoyed Shades of Grey more I think: I enjoyed Early Riser and at times couldn’t put it down, but when I finished I felt my experience overall to be average.

If you are fan of Fforde or alternate earth stories, this will be worth reading. Outside of certain niche interests though it would be hard to recommend for me.

Shades of Grey – Jasper Fforde (Book Review)

Though never reading any of his books previously, I am aware of Jasper Fforde. This book was recommended by a friend strongly enough to persuade me to buy it:

Hundreds of years in the future, after the Something that Happened, the world is an alarmingly different place. Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is determined by your perception of colour.

Eddie Russett is an above average Red who dreams of moving up the ladder by marriage to Constance Oxblood. Until he is sent to the Outer Fringes where he meets Jane – a lowly Grey with an uncontrollable temper and a desire to see him killed.

For Eddie, it’s love at first sight. But his infatuation will lead him to discover that all is not as it seems in a world where everything that looks black and white is really shades of grey . . .

This book is a dystopian fututre where society has been divided into classes based upon the individual’s colour perception: from Purples at the top, to greys at the bottom considered little more than savages. Relationships are determined almost exclusively by who will benefit your hue, with strong blues and reds looking to marry for the purpose of a purple child, leading them into a higher social standing.

Eddie is sent with his dad to a small town where corruption is evident in what is known as ‘loopholery’; still adherence to the rules, though a questionably one.

As it becomes clear that not everything people are told is true, Eddie strays dangerously close to Rule-breaking to seek the truth.

This book is bizarre to describe but incredible to read – it is a book that is certainly difficult to put down. With so many hidden secrets and unsolved questions, the reader is lured into the solution as much as the characters – hoping for a more emotive society than what is currently there.

I haven’t read many dystopian future books, and this is certainly a great introduction to them – thankfully it is also a series so I look forward to the release of the next volume!

Highly recommended – the humour is spot-on on the plot fascinating.