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.
