I read this 620 page fantasy dystopia novel in a week because it was deeply engrossing to me, fast-paced, interesting and mysterious. It's been comparI read this 620 page fantasy dystopia novel in a week because it was deeply engrossing to me, fast-paced, interesting and mysterious. It's been compared to Red Rising by Pierce Brown, a science fiction novel/series that I loved, and I can see why. The society is loosely modelled on ancient Greece (or Rome? ... they're pretty similar in my head... ) and patriarchal (though not rigidly - women are educated and often work), with a very structured hierarchical social structure.
Here, people cede their will to someone of a higher social standing. The higher your status, the more will you receive, which corresponds to power in the political and magical senses of the word. As in Red Rising, the main character, Vis, is a young man (teenager) from the oppressed side of the hierarchy who disguises himself as an elite. Although, Vis is actually a prince, but one believed to be dead.
There's mystery and adventure and political intrigue - honestly, the 620 pages just fly by! There's still lots that's unexplained (like, I don't know how people cede their will or how it's organised in a day-to-day sense) but I think that will come.
James Islington is an Australian author but I'm not familiar with his work. Curious now though! I loved this, keen for book 2....more
I've barely started and I'm already finding this review hard to write - not for the usual reasons, though. It's hard because all I really want to be dI've barely started and I'm already finding this review hard to write - not for the usual reasons, though. It's hard because all I really want to be doing right now is reading the second book, Golden Son! I finished Red Rising three days ago and as soon as I could, I popped into Dymocks to get the next one. And ended up buying the third book as well! Yes, I loved Red Rising and I want to share the love.
Darrow is a helldiver, born into the Red mining clan of Lykos deep below the surface of Mars, hundreds of years in our future. The Reds mine for helium-3, needed in the terraforming process to make Mars habitable. They've been raised on the understanding that they are pioneers, sent out in advance of the rest of Earth's humanity to prepare Mars for habitation. Darrow is sixteen, married, fast and dexterous and, as a helldiver, more than a little arrogant. But despite the horrible conditions, short lifespan and never having enough to eat or any comforts, he's always believed. The discovery that it's all a lie, that Mars has long since been successfully terraformed and inhabited while the Reds continue to slave underground, is a shock.
Their society is one ruled by a hierarchy of colours. A post-democratic world, this new galactic empire is based on the idea of merit - though this is in itself an illusion. Everything is ruled by the Golds, and amongst the Golds, by the Peerless Scarred: Golds with a distinctive scar down one side of their face. They are the intelligent ones, and everyone else's life is cheap and of no consequence. Between Gold and Red are many other rungs, some of them genetically altered and born into a particular kind of service. It is not possible to move between colours. The Golds rule coldly, ruthlessly, with an inherent understanding of their own superiority.
When Darrow's wife is sentenced to death by the ArchGovernor of Mars, Augustus, it triggers a chain of events that see Darrow recruited by the resistance group, the Sons of Ares, who surgically - and painfully - transform him into a Gold. This is only the start: next he must pass the entrance exams to get into the Intitute, where Golds are trained to succeed and where a select few will become Peerless Scarred. Getting in looks easy compared with what Darrow will have to do once there, in a game of survival with the odds stacked against him.
Red Rising gets compared to Ender's Game and The Hunger Games, which is a fair comparison. However, I enjoyed this so much more. It has more substance than The Hunger Games, and while Brown also uses present tense, I found I could forgive it. As an adult dystopian fiction novel, Red Rising has the necessary qualities of the genre, but is far less dry and much more exciting than anti-utopian dystopian fiction (I am assuming, with confidence, that this will be a straight-up dystopian, with a hopeful ending at the conclusion of the series). The status quo is quite terrifying, so rigidly structured and, in many ways, brutal. The details with which Brown has rendered his futuristic, oppressive society make it feel very real. There are some aspects that bring to mind certain movies and science fiction TV shows - I've recently started watching Altered Carbon on Netflix and there are some subtle similarities, notably in terms of those with all the power and their ideas of entertainment.
The Golds also reminded me a little of the Masters in Ricardo Pinto's Stone Dance of the Chameleon trilogy. There, the rulers are white-skinned and wear masks of gold; for a lesser human to look upon their naked face is a death sentence. The Masters in Pinto's story are similar in temperament and superiority to the Golds.
These intertextual similarities don't detract from the strength of Brown's work, though, which is all in the ideas and the storytelling. Darrow is young, flawed yet deeply likeable, and his story is riveting. The 'game' at the Institute is a hard one - the several hundred 'students' are given a year to win a battlefield. They are not meant to kill each other but casualties happen and there are no repercussions. Cruelties abound, all amongst Golds. Thrust into the midst of this minefield, Darrow aims not merely to survive but to win. It is exciting, engrossing stuff, all against a background of injustice and repression. Darrow fights not only for himself or the memory of his wife, but all his people.
Red Rising is rich with an attention to detail that is often missing from modern dystopian stories, especially those in the Young Adult market. There's brutality here, torture and death and the author doesn't hold back from the violence. Coupled with the ideologies and sentiments that the Golds give voice to, the violence reinforces the problems with this otherwise hugely successful society. The feeling of being trapped is ever-present, echoed in the many real traps faced by Darrow, or which Darrow plans for others.
Quite often, I experience boredom when reading, which is why I hunger for romance - I want to feel something, and connect with the story and its characters. Too often, plot is not enough and can't hold me alone. But here, where there is no romance, and certainly no sexual tension, I didn't miss it at all, didn't need it, didn't want it. On the other hand, Brown isn't quite successful at constructing sexual tension when he's supposed to, as seen between Darrow and Mustang (a nickname). I liked Mustang a lot, just as I liked Eo, Darrow's fifteen year old wife (Reds marry young - and die young). Possibly, a balance between well-constructed plot, the ideas and the relationships between characters is not quite there. And as you'd expect, the resistance to oppression is a class-based one, not a gender-based one. It is mentioned early on in the second book that the Golds deliberately created Red society to be patriarchal, but where this falls flat is that the patriarchy is entrenched, and everywhere. But gender imbalance is not one of the cards on the table, here.
These quibbles aside, there is a lot to enjoy here. It is mostly plot and world-building that I enjoy, and Darrow himself, but a thoughtful examination of the problems with a meritocracy is always present. You can even look at this society as representative of our own hegemonic structure, though of course we don't use colours and supposedly we can raise ourselves up. A true dystopian novel always takes a current trend and extends or exaggerates it, showing what could happen if it's not nipped in the bud. Comparisons with the reader's world are part of the relationship between reader and narrative, in this genre. The plot has distracted me, but a critique on an aspect of our society is there, brewing. (If it's not, if it really is just plot in the end, like the Hunger Games, I shall be sorely disappointed!)
If you don't mind a bit of blood and guts and you're looking for an exciting story to sink your teeth into, I can't recommend Red Rising enough. ...more
The Circle is a perfectly timed book and will be timely for quite some time, ha ha. The question of our right to privacy has long been debated and is The Circle is a perfectly timed book and will be timely for quite some time, ha ha. The question of our right to privacy has long been debated and is not altogether a given - even less so since 9-11. The right to privacy has taken on a new dimension since the world wide web took off and social media became 'the thing'. While social media can be empowering and has been used to a means to redress a power imbalance (think of those who film police beating someone up, or the Arab Spring), it can also have the reverse effect. Pair this up with the amazing power of the internet - or rather, specific software programs and companies - to track our usage, our spending, our habits etc. in order to 'better' or more 'efficiently' target us with 'tailored' products, and it can seem like the whole world is watching you. (There is the interesting case, in the United States, of the teenage girl who started receiving advertising for baby products; her father, outraged, complained, but it turns out she was pregnant and didn't even know it - but the companies did. They knew she was pregnant before she did because of the things she was buying, which apparently, women who are pregnant tend to buy. Such is the vast volume of data at their disposal that their algorithms are able to work that kind of thing out.)
When Mae Holland gets a job at The Circle (modelled on Google), she feels giddy and in awe. Sure, it's in a call centre division, answering customer service emails, but in a company like the Circle, people notice when you prove yourself, and Mae is determined to prove herself. At first, though, it seems that her values and ideals are at odds with the Circle's: they want total transparency in people's lives, while she still goes out in a kayak for peace and solitude and, horror of all horrors, doesn't post about it on social media. Mae mends her ways and becomes a staunch supporter of everything the Circle does and says. But in a company that has eyes and ears everywhere, who is the strange, enigmatic man who slips in and about, undetected? The name he told her doesn't show in the system, and Mae soon doubts that he works there at all, but it's not long before she realises that he may be planning something. So when he asks for her help, Mae is faced with a momentous decision.
As someone who is not on her mobile phone constantly, or who uses her social media accounts with any frequency (I visit maybe once a week, and post even less), and as a teacher who is constantly in competition with the distraction of mobile phones (or rather, their internet connectivity) at a period in our civilisation in which the boundaries between work/study and social time seem ever more blurred by users, I found the Circle and its creed disturbing, even frightening, but all too real. The Circle represents the kind of oppression - through the denial of a right to privacy - that the people not only buy into, but enforce. In effect, people police themselves, a kind of brainwashing. It all comes down to the power of language, and the power of public relations (the other name for PR is 'propaganda').
Mae is something of a frustrating heroine because she's not very bright. She's easily impressed, and other people's arguments - in particular, the people who run the Circle - completely blindside her. Mae represents the vast blob of humanity in this: she is the everyman, a simple, ordinary person with modest ambitions and modest intelligence. It doesn't make for easy reading, in the sense that she makes you, the reader, feel more superior - and I'm not someone who is all that keen on feeling that way.
In true literary dystopian fashion, this has an ending that you probably won't like, but it is the right ending for the story. While the understanding of dystopian fiction, as a genre, has been skewed by the slew of Young Adult adventure novels - in which the dystopia serves as setting and premise, but which aren't, really, dystopian stories in and of themselves (more like coming-of-age stories for young teens with a message of hope and freedom through collaboration, resilience, perseverance and rebellion against an oppressive regime) - really, the dystopian genre is concerned with a satiric representation of authority and socio-political commentary. They're not meant to be thrillers or romances or coming of age stories or exciting adventures. They're meant to be dark, troubling thought experiments that emphasise flaws in our political structure, social values and to show us where we might end up should we follow a certain path. Here, Eggers has taken on Google's vast reach, the influence of social media and the troubling infringements on privacy through laws that are passed with little fanfare, all in the name of protecting us and freedom - an irony that is best served through the satirical nature of dystopic work - and his ending is apt. As such, I value this novel for its ideas and the disturbingly realistic depiction of twenty-first century westerners, even though it is at times slow and Mae herself is rather too realistic for comfort. But that's the point, surely: you shouldn't get too comfortable, reading a dystopian novel.
![Galactic Pot-healer [Paperback] Dick, Philip K.](https://cdn.statically.io/img/i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348222724l/534006._SY75_.jpg)
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