Mark Reads ‘Divergent’

A little bit of background, in case you missed my post that announced that I was doing one-off reviews! I have feelings about books, and I feel weird not writing them down. I DO. This is what this site has done to me! So, I’ll be bringing single reviews back to the site to discuss entire books, and this is what I’m starting with: Veronica Roth’s Divergent.

Trigger Warning: For discussion of abuse, racism, and violence.

I suppose I didn’t have much knowledge of the series going into it, aside from knowing that it was a dystopian YA novel. I hadn’t seen the trailer, though I’d seen commentary about whitewashing in the film adaptation. That’s it. Lots of my friends had either read the trilogy or loved it, but it just never got on my radar. Which is understandable! I kind of have a lot going on in my life.

But then, I was asked to cover for a friend of mine who could not be on a panel she helped design and plan for LeakyCon 2014: Disabilities in YA. And one of the main series she wanted the panel to focus on? Divergent. So I felt compelled to read the source material so that I wasn’t doing research at the last minute to be informed for the panel. Thankfully, the entire trilogy was on sale in the Kindle store, so lo and behold, I read Divergent in a single sitting from San Francisco to Orlando.

It’s a brisk read, despite being nearly 500 pages long. Roth’s prose flows rapidly on the pages, and I admit that I liked the simplicity of it. It’s a complex story, which isn’t always a good thing, so I appreciated that Tris’s narration moved so quickly. The tense? Yeah, I wasn’t really into first person present, so I’m thankful that otherwise, I was able to get into her style.

I don’t know, however, that I could have gotten through the first fifty pages if I hadn’t intended to finish it in a single sitting. I’m a fast reader, granted, and fifty pages is less than an hour of reading for me. But I had problems with the novel right from the start, and unfortunately, they didn’t disappear as I got further into the meat of the story. Simply put, I am still flabbergasted by the setup in this world. As of right now, I’m nearly halfway through Insurgent, and I keep waiting for someone – anyone, at this point – to just tell me how the fuck this universe is even possible. We’re told right off the bat that this world is split into five factions that keep order possible, and kids test into the right faction at sixteen. (I assume that it’s everyone who is sixteen at the time of the annual test, right? I don’t think it was everyone’s sixteenth birthday the day of Tris’s test, but that’s how little sense this makes.) What blows my mind about this whole thing is that at the end of the day, you can just choose to be in another faction. If that’s the case, why the fuck are there tests anyway? Why are people so shocked about the existence of divergent people if someone can be raised in one culture/faction but choose another? Clearly, people can possess two attributes at once, right? Like…

Okay, I realize that trying to parse this is an act of futility in one sense, since a lot of dystopian environments aren’t supposed to make sense in terms that we understand. But my problems with the factions comes from some place else: I don’t think the worldbuilding makes a whole lot of sense. Is there no central figure or organization that created this whole thing? What happened out in the world to bring about this version of Chicago? Do other cities have a similar set-up, or are we meant to assume that Chicago is the only place that survived…. something? I suppose that speaks to another issue I had with the book, which is that Roth dangles a lot of mysteries in front of the reader, and not a single one of them ever feels like they’re answered with any satisfaction. Which is okay in and of itself, because lord knows I love a good serialized narrative. But to give us so little to go on feels like cheating, because the mystery here isn’t the Erudite and Dauntless collaboration. I am far more interested in finding out what the hell happened to make this all possible, and I don’t get anything on that front. Oh, we get close when Roth begins to peel back the layers on Natalie and Andrew Prior, but nope! DEAD. No hope!

And seriously, let me get to the one thing that is pretty unforgivable for me. I can accept that it might take Insurgent and Allegiant to explain some of these issues. I might have to write a review admitting how wrong I was! But if you are going to set a book in Chicago, then I have to ask: Where are all the black people? Like… are they all factionless? If so, there’s absolutely no critical gaze turned towards that idea. Look, Chicago has been a majority-minority city (meaning that the non-white population actually outnumbers the usual majority white population) since at least 2000, probably earlier than that. I do not expect all of my fiction to be literate in critical race theory. I do expect that when an author chooses cities like Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Miami, NYC, etc., for their work, they understand that if they portray said cities as mostly white, they are actively erasing or ignoring what those cities are like. WHERE ARE THEY. Why are most of the characters in this book white?

I’m hoping that some of the conversation in the comments might clear up some misconceptions or misunderstandings on my part, but there’s a lot more going on here that pretty much kept me stuck on the fence regarding Divergent. Tris is perplexing to me, though that’s usually a good thing. If we accept that this novel is an exploration of identity, then I think it’s fairly realistic that Tris doesn’t always make sense. I don’t want my heroes and protagonists to be without flaws, and truthfully, a lot of Tris’s anxiety helped make her a lot more understandable to me. Finding out you’re leaving the faction you grew up with is bad enough, but to add the whole divergent thing on top of that? I think Roth did a fine job exploring how fucked up that would be for a person. Which is why Four works so well as Tris’s companion throughout the novel! He’s been through this very same struggle, too, though his situation is even more complex than Tris’s. His father abused him, which influenced his decision to go to Dauntless, and he’s got a past in Abnegation, too.

As for their romance? I admit it didn’t do much for me, though I am into stories where couples/partners work together to solve a problem. That made all their angst and disagreements a tad irritating to me because I kept wanting to shout that THE WORLD IS ENDING, GO DEAL WITH THAT OKAY. But I understood why these two were paired with one another!

What I totally did not expect was how relentlessly fucked up this book was. From the threats of sexual assault, to Al’s suicide, to the way that Dauntless is perfectly fine casting undesirables out of their faction, to THE ENTIRE LAST SET OF SCENES WHERE EVERYONE IS DYING AND WHAT THE FUCK, this book was incredibly disturbing. Some of it worked, but I found that I wanted more of a critical eye in the text when it came to certain aspects of the Dauntless world that were so upsetting. Like, isn’t stabbing someone in the eye in the middle of the night a sign of cowardice? Why didn’t anyone in Dauntless go after Peter? How on Earth did Dauntless come to develop such a brutal stance on who to accept, and how the fuck do they ever get new members? Why haven’t they died out yet???

As for the climax of the novel, it left me with more questions than elation or thrills. I still don’t know how this world came about, and while there’s a decent amount of explanation for the friction between factions, I was still confused as to why any faction would risk tearing apart this system in order to wield control. And what’s with Roth writing Erudite as utterly irredeemable? That caught me off guard. It’s almost like how Rowling wrote Slytherin at times, isn’t it? Basically, I feel like Roth was holding out on me in the end of Divergent. Clearly, Jeanine has something else planned, and the Priors knew way more about… something? They knew something about stuff for reasons? I dunno, I think it’s dangerous to withhold this much in your first novel, because I felt bewildered by the end of Divergent. I wanted to like the characters more, but I felt like I just had a billion questions that weren’t answered at all.

SO, WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS BOOK? Please mind our normal commenting policy; all spoilers for anything beyond this book must be put in rot13. My next one-off will be for Insurgent once I finish it!

Goodreads review.

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About Mark Oshiro

Perpetually unprepared since '09.
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1 Response to Mark Reads ‘Divergent’

  1. Mizuki says:

    I like the idea behind Erudite faction the best and probably would have been in there. It did bug me how they were the ‘bad guys’ but I can see how years of being known as the ‘smart group’ ((kind of like Ravenclaw? Why was that never a problem in HP??)) could inflate the faction’s ego.

    Also, I didn’t really think about the lack of representation in the book until you mentioned it (the bad thing about growing up an indoctrinated ‘majority’) and it’s true there isn’t really much variation at all. I don’t really know what else to say about it.

    Also also, I would have been happy with Divergent as a standalone.

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