Jasper Fforde on Red Side Story and how dyslexia helped rewire his brain

When I said I’d be going to Aberystwyth, everyone told me to bring a raincoat and, perhaps, an umbrella for good measure. And yet, when I met Jasper Fforde at a clifftop cafe and he handed me a book I’d been waiting 14 years to read, the sun was beaming down and the Welsh seaside was clear and bright and sparkling as far as my eyes could see.

It was strangely fitting – the author is best known for creating worlds that are pretty much just like ours except slightly off. Worlds where the winters are so cold that humans go into hibernation. Worlds where the plots of books are constantly playing out just one layer behind our own – and where literary crimes need their own detectives to solve them. Worlds where your place in society is determined by what colours you can see.

It’s this final one that Fforde has stepped back into after a long absence. In 2009 he released Shades of Grey, a book set in the not-too-distant future where society is stratified based not only on what you can see, but how well you can see it. It follows Eddie Russett, a young “Red” on the cusp of a bright future who, after falling in with the rebellious Jane Grey, starts to see the cracks in a system he’s believed in all his life. It’s a wild ride, involving carnivorous plants, roads that can heal themselves, a spoon shortage, a cliffhanger ending and, as is typical of Fforde’s work, a lot of clever wordplay. It also flew under the radar for quite a while, which is why, in part, it has taken until now for the sequel, Red Side Story, to be written.

“It just didn’t sell very well,” Fforde reflects over Skype a few months after our meeting. “But it had a kind of strange cult following, which started appearing about five or six years after.” He pauses. “I just kept on getting these emails saying ‘do the sequel, do the sequel, please do the sequel, we’ll threaten you with violence if you don’t’. So, being a coward, I kind of just said yes.”

Fforde’s conversation is like his books – laced with humour, references and storytelling while also probing for deeper meaning.

In Red Side Story, “we’re carrying on the story pretty much where we left off” he explains. When the book opens, only a few days have passed for Eddie and Jane. Though little time has moved for his characters, for the man who wove them into being many things have shifted.

“I mean, I hope I’ve changed some way in 13 years,” he says with a small smile. “If I wrote Shades of Grey today … I think it would be very different.”

Despite having written six very successful books beforehand, Fforde explains that Shades of Grey was “what I called my first proper novel”. At that point, he had written four Thursday Next and two Nursery Crimes books – related series that follow detectives solving the many mysteries taking place in the world of fiction. They are witty and extremely original stories in their own right, however despite his clear fondness for the characters, he describes the books, rather self-deprecatingly, as “moving furniture around in people’s heads” as they draw upon, subvert and riff on work from everyone ranging from Blyton to Wordsworth.

“They were kind of referential to other people’s work and stuff that was in pop culture. So, for me, writing Shades of Grey was Jasper Fforde as an author trying to be an author. I wanted to have my own characters, my own situations, and I wanted to do something that was totally me,” he explains.

In the time between the original and the sequel, Fforde has written more Thursday Next books (though the next one, he explains, will be the last), started a new series, and has written the standalone novels Early Riser and The Constant Rabbit, both of which contain his very specific melding of wordplay and silliness but do tap into more overt themes. They’re books “where I think I’m actually trying to say something maybe a little bit more important”, he says. They’re darker and take clearer aim at specific issues in the world.

Coming back to Red Side Story at this point in his life, Fforde hopes the book will contain the best of both his early work and what he has learned since. Having now read it twice, I think it does – though at the same time I feel like his assessment of Shades of Grey is a little harsh on his past self.

Fforde’s career trajectory has been an interesting one. He was 39 when his first book, The Eyre Affair, was published. Prior to writing, he was working in the film industry as a focus puller, his credits including The Mask of Zorro, Entrapment and GoldenEye.

It’s at this point in the interview I say the thing that horrifies even the most staunch of subjects as I try and ease into a question: “I’ve been on your Wikipedia page.” Here, in between Fforde’s own accomplishments it lists relatives who have all excelled in their chosen careers, including his father John Standish Fforde who was the 24th chief cashier for the Bank of England. This means, for a time, Fforde’s father’s signature was present on all new banknotes in the country. So, I ask: “Growing up, was there a pressure to be excellent?”

“Massively,” he replies immediately. “My dad was very highly regarded … he had a very impressive career and he was essentially the big intellectual high-flyer within his family, and there was a lot of pressure on us all to succeed.” Fforde has two elder brothers and a younger sister, and he explains how his educational trajectory had all been mapped out early on starting with a feeder school and ending at Oxford. His brothers both did follow the pathway, “but that all fell by the wayside with me”.

It wasn’t until he was in his 50s that Fforde realised he had mild dyslexia, something that wasn’t recognised when he was at school, so was “generally regarded as a little bit slow”. As a result, he was pulled off his pathway. “Although we had initially huge expectations placed upon us to be something fantastic, those were actually removed from me when I was eight or nine and I had no expectations after that which, I think, was actually a huge release.”

If you take a look back over his work and his interests, you can see how that drive was funnelled in new directions. Fforde describes joining the film industry as “running away to the circus”. His Instagram is filled with photography that shows both his keen interest in the world and fascination with perfecting and toying with film cameras. His website has sections mapping out the real-life locations that inspire fantastical counterparts in his novels.

After deciding to turn his hand to writing, Fforde spent 12 years having his manuscripts rejected before the publication of The Eyre Affair in 2001 allowed him to become an author full-time. The dedication at the front of his first novel reads: “For my father … Who never knew I was to be published but would have been most proud nonetheless – and not a little surprised.”

For a while, Fforde was writing a book a year, “then it was 18 months, and now it’s one every two years,” he reflects. Red Side Story was finished a year ago, but all up he estimates it took about 18 months to write plus thinking time beforehand. Compared to earlier novels, however, he says “it wasn’t massively easy”. He pauses. “My mother had Alzheimer’s and I became the carer … but that’s come to the sort of inevitable conclusion that these conditions do.”

For the past six years, Fforde balanced writing with caring for his mother. Now, “I’m trying to think whether that experience in any way went into the book – and I’m not sure that it did, which seems strange to me because it was such a huge part- anyone who’s cared for a parent or close relative with dementia you know it becomes a massive part of your life,” he reflects. “I’d be very interested to see if anyone has noticed anything that might have snuck in there.”

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It’s difficult to reveal much about Red Side Story – the middle book of what will be a trilogy – without spoiling significant parts of the plot. However, human nature, and whether it skews inherently good or inherently bad, is something explored throughout not only this novel but the whole body of Fforde’s work.

One aspect of human nature that comes to the forefront in this series is, as Fforde phrases is, how “we do bad things to try and make good things happen … one of the points of the first book was imagine a prison in which you are the prisoner and the guards”.

Even Fforde’s most abhorrent characters often show capacity for growth, to do the right thing. On a collective level, however, can humankind make the same kind of progress? “It’s awful people doing terrible things in a very unpleasant world, but who find a bit of inner strength to try and do what’s right. So I like the fact that really unpleasant people, when they finally realise it’s pretty unpleasant out there, they can find something within themselves to be decent, you know?”

Fforde looks at the world in an unusual way, and through his books he invites his readers to do the same. For this, at least in part, he thanks his dyslexia. “It allowed me to rewire my brain because I couldn’t compete with all the clever people with joined up writing and consistent spelling and all that nonsense. You can’t compete with that – so you find other ways of competing. You make up strange stories and trying to make people laugh.”

If there’s something different about you, he emphasises, you can make it work in your favour. “Because you’re different, you’ll think different and you’ll do things different – and that’s exciting. It moves the world onwards.”

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