Rush, rush... And a review of Veronica Roth's DIVERGENT

May flew by, but not without a bit of exciting reading. 

While setting up my company’s booth at the International Reading Association, I peeked next door and saw a postcard for Insurgent, the sequel to a book on my shelf at home.

“The first book in that series is on the top of my reading list at home,” I told an attendant. Some middle-aged guy working for a tiny publisher of books for the special education market had just admitted to reading a book for teenaged girls. Very suspicious.

And it wasn’t exactly true, but I’m glad I lied. When I got home and saw Divergent, the first book in the series, I started in on it very quickly. It was the most exciting teen novel I’d read since finishing Mockingjay, and that was a year and a half ago. (I read the first five Game of Thrones books in the interim, but that won’t compare very well for all the differences, and I reacted differently to Martin’s fantasy, anyway.)

It was so exciting, the next thing I read (aside from manga, stuff for work, or soccer training materials) was Catching Fire, which I just finished a few hours ago.

The bridges between Divergent and the Hunger Games series are urgency, a compelling dystopian setting, clockwork structure, and well-crafted teenage female leads.

The urgency of Divergent is less existential, at first. The problems Beatrice Prior faces are subtler and less immediately lethal than those faced by Katniss Everdeen. Somehow, the wrenching philosophical and emotional issues Beatrice faces rise to the level of urgency of Katniss’. Rereading Catching Fire reminded me not only how well Suzanne Collins wrote action sequences, but also how well she wrote interior monologue. The strands of conflict and significance revealed in the first chapter follow through each to the last, taut and humming. This is the urgency matched by Veronica Roth in Divergent.

Strange laws, a warped society, alien values or ways of expressing them, the transformation of the familiar into the strange—these are some of the elements that go into a believable dystopia. Both worlds—Panem and Veronica Roth’s Chicago—have somewhat simplistic organizations. Panem has twelve, or maybe thirteen (find out for yourself), districts and a Capitol region, spread out across the former United States. Each produces specific commodities or manufactures a class of products, almost as Roman colonies, but simplified. One district manufactures electronics, one mines coal, one produces textiles, and no others duplicate these categories. Two produce food: one terrestrial and one maritime. Readers can accept this unrealistic situation because the rest of the narrative is so immediately realistic, almost tactile. Collins is especially successful at evoking place, both in terms of sensation and in terms of emotion.

Roth’s Chicago is cleverly transformed in physical terms, but still recognizable. The crucial social organization is simplified and easily understood, but simplistic, the Faction as unrealistic as the Districts of Panem. In place of Districts producing distinct products, each Faction in Divergent subscribes to different values and norms of behavior. This, even more than the differences among districts in The Hunger Games trilogy, adds color to the story line.

This is a good point to make a transition from comparing the dystopias to comparing the high degree of organization common to the Hunger Games trilogy and Divergent. I felt that this was what distinguished Roth’s and Collins’ work from other teen fiction. At each stage, significant details are revealed that either set the stage for later, elaborate on a theme from earlier, or both. The heroine (protoheroine?) Beatrice Prior’s early-revealed fascination with the daring members of the Dauntlesss Faction makes more sense as layers of the society, Beatrice’s past, and her family’s past are revealed, adding layer upon layer of significance to events and situations that seem unimportant or ambiguous.

Collins ratchets up the emotional stress with each additional layer, threatening to overwhelm the reader. Roth weaves the strands of significance back and forth a little less intensely, at least within the first book, but in a similar manner.

One of the similarities in appeal between the Hunger Games trilogy and Divergent is in modeling personalities in the books after real-world teen concerns. In the Hunger Games, children are forced into combat in the arena each year. In Divergent, teens choose their faction at the age of 16, and are initiated or cast out depending on their ability to adapt to completely new rules. This is far more subtle a setup than the Hunger Games, and there’s no central villain in the arrangement, but the most notable difference is that the factions behave a lot like social cliques in some ways. Imagine social cliques with their own laws, territories, and lethal induction ceremonies, as well as hangouts, clothing styles, lingo, and forms of entertainment.

Beth Revis, Across the Universe AND Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy

Note: I am laaaaazy. I started writing this at the beginning of the month, and I've made progress at the rate of about 20 words per day, on average. This is pretty darn lame. Still, there were some things I wanted to share about what I read, so please humor me by reading on.

One of my favorite first chapters is in Beth Revis's Across the Universe, which is her first novel. She wrapped me up in the story with her wrenching introduction/first act narrative. I liked how she really dove into the conflicts of one main character's starting point. Of course, the conflict changes, and Revis successfully balances a second protagonist, as well.

Ultimately, I found myself only partly pleased with the novel, and it's all Orson Scott Card's fault.

That because I was reading Card's well-aged How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy. This occasions an admission on my part, a somewhat painful one, considering that I read a lot, much of it science fiction and fantasy: I've never read a book by Orson Scott Card before.

Nope. Not one. Not even Ender's Game.

For those who don't know what kind of an admission this is, say, maybe you're not a sci-fi nut, or you've just been defrosted after an avalanche buried you in the Alps in the last Ice Age, this makes me howl with derision. It's sort of like living in the US and admitting you've never eaten corn on the cob, or growing up in the 70s without knowing what Farrah Fawcett looked like. That out of touch.

So why is this Card's fault? (I feel a need to justify this, after comparing him to corn on the cob and a 70s "pin-up girl".)

I work in publishing, and I read a lot, and I'm trying to write, and he really spoke to that confluence of concerns with his book. How to Write, that is. Not Ender.

Scott focuses on how a writer needs to think about readers as a segmented market, that they access a writer's work not by its ideas or its quality, but by its marketing. This makes eminent sense, and Card humorously and helpfully takes us through an abbreviated version of his own voyage of discovery on this, with substantial diversions into strategies to manage the channeling of creativity.

As a publisher and reader, his observations meet with my own experiences, but as a writer, I was surprised to find I had not put them into practice. Card specifically does not argue against breaking boundaries and opening new ground. He simply, and eloquently, shows how sales categories help customers find books they will like. The point-of-sale success of categories like "fantasy" and "mystery" leads booksellers, distributors, publishers, and best-selling authors, to think in those terms as well. For Card, it's a matter of how hard one wants to fight to get sales. If you're OK with the challenge, cross boundaries. If you'd just like to have your book read, consider living, and writing, within them.

He also offers some keen tidbits of advice. One of the ones I remember is about using offensive language. Consistent with his approach in this book, he doesn't moralize about this. He simply observes that market placement will constrict with expletives, and expand with their deletion. He advises against made-up expletives because they will break the spell the author is spending so much time and energy to create.


So, how did Ms. Revis lose me? I learned from Card (yep - his fault) that publishers respect the boundaries of genre fiction. For instance, the boundaries among romance, mystery, and science fiction. Those would be easy to see, right?

Of course, this isn't true at all, and the value of Revis' book lies partly in her ability to weave multiple levels of narrative together. There's a travelogue, coming of age (twice over), mystery, and the sci-fi setting, all blended into a single, very readable narrative. (Brava!)

My problem was that I was focusing too much on the different types of narrative to enjoy their combination fully.

The science fiction setting is, in the end, mainly a setting, however. I recall reading something from Philip Dick, shortly after he started to be recognized as more than a crank and a hack, and also shortly before he died, that in science fiction, the universe in which the story is set differs in one main aspect from our own, and the characters are principally involved in dealing with that difference.

Take Robert Silverberg's The World Inside. The premise is that on an overcrowded future Earth, people live in gigantic high-rises surrounded by open space. The novel isn't about how the high-rises are built, or why, or the political machinations needed to force people into them. It's about how people adapt to the circumstances they're in, which fundamentally differ from our own.

I like (but don't worship) that definition of science fiction. It mostly works. Across the Universe, however, may as well have been set on an island as on an intergalactic, intergenerational space ship. It would be a fascinating story in a different setting. And that only bothers me, I suspect, because I learned to look for this in a last-millennium "how-to" book.