Trigger warning for discussion of rape.
Most often reviews on /r/Fantasy are gushing about wonderful books, but it's also useful to get a review of why someone DIDN'T like a book. And since I was given the ARC of this, and promised an honest review, here goes.
No spoilers past the first 10% or so, because I couldn't actually make myself finish this.
This was pretty much designed to push every "let's annoy Mike" button a book can. This is a dystopian book, set in a world where much of the world is reduced to varying levels of barbarism. The exception is the Republic, where the authoritarian Father provides for the citizens and religion is outlawed. The protagonists are a group of rebels who live on the edges of Republic territory, scraping out an existence as they can.
It's all a rather cliche set-up, and doesn't rise above it. I love a good dystopian book, but the best ones all bring something beyond the traditional tropes. This... doesn't. That was the first problem.
Then let me talk about the "religion is outlawed" thing. I didn't think much of it when I saw the blurb - doesn't seem like that odd of a premise. The Soviet Union was officially atheist, after all, and it's not like religious persecution is something new. But then I read about one of the opening sequences, which features Republic secret police raiding a home of suspected dissidents. The contraband they find is ... a Bible. Which gets them a death sentence. I don't want to offend anyone, but I have no patience for Christians with a persecution complex in the Western world (McDermott is Australian). No one is oppressing you. So that annoyed me right from the start.
Then we meet the Good Guys. We know they're the Good Guys because the operation they are conducting against the Republic is to steal medical supplies, and because we are told (repeatedly) that they work really, really hard to avoid killing anybody, relying on tranquilizers even though it would be much safer from their perspective just to shoot the guards. Like I said, Good Guys.
We get a few tutoring sessions with a precocious little cherub of a nine year old in the Republic, all about the failure of the old world. It came down to a conflict between "the West" with their silly devotion to individual rights, and the "the East" with their silly devotion to their religion. The subtext of "the East" being the Islamic world isn't exactly subtle. China isn't a thing, apparently. Again, I could handle that set-up, but the way it was presented ... ugh. Much of it consisted of the clever little child laughing (literally laughing) at how those people in the pre-Apocalypse days were so stooooopid to believe in this stuff. It left me with the feeling I got from reading Terry Goodkind's page after page after page of Objectivist politics, but with the added annoyance of having it come at me from a snooty little kid.
We're introduced to more of the rebels. A lot more. And remember, I stopped like 10% through. I'm not going to bother going back and counting, but I would bet I met at least 15 people, probably as many as 20, in a very short period of time. As an avowed WoT fan, complaining about the number of characters might seem a bit odd, but we didn't just get names - we got backstories and histories. Robert Jordan might have thrown a lot of names at people early on, but you're not presented Ban al'Seen or Samel Crawe or Buel Dowtry as someone worth remembering. It was overwhelming, and had the effect of making me care about none of them.
But then we get to the moment that made me put this book down and walk away. We come back to the dissidents with the Bible , now taken outside the boundaries of the Republic. Where they are first raped (husband made to watch wife being raped, then vice versa). And then shot. One side avoids killing, the other rapes people before executing them. In case it wasn't clear who the Bad Guys were.
What made me decide to put this down (and I gave it a fair shot - I only read about 10%, but this is an almost-1000-page tome) was that scene. Throwing in gratuitous rape to establish your grimdark bonafides isn't just offensive to me, it's lazy. Add in the fact that the first gay character we meet is a sadistic rapist, feeding into the tired old stereotype of gay people as sexual deviants - I was done.
So, a DNF. Others might like it - the writing was fine. But it's not for me.
Comments