Divergent by Veronica Roth

I bought Divergent as one of my ‘stab in the dark’ choices. I barely looked at the back cover, glancing briefly to make sure it wasn’t a Twilight knockoff before adding it to the large pile of books I wanted to buy.
As a result, it’s been sitting in my ‘to read’ pile for a while, looking at me forlornly. I’m generally less optimistic about books I don’t know anything about. But I decided to pick it up for a spot of lunchtime reading. Sometime later, I put it down again, having finished, and realised it was dark outside. All in all, with a few breaks, it took me just over six hours to read Divergent and that is a test to its quality, not its length.
It’s a tasty mix of The Hunger Games, Inside Out and Harry Potter. There’s a good deal of violence, a love story and a very well built world. It, like the aforementioned Hunger Games, manages to have a fantasy feel without ever going beyond the bounds of what a human can do. There’s desperation, decisions not entirely thought through and something going on at the top that isn’t quite kosher. You won’t find dragons, magic or gods here. Just people.
Divergent is set in a world that could be ours if you add in a massive war and a serious change in politics. The people are split into five group depending on what they think would heal the world: selflessness, happiness, knowledge, truth or courage. That’s the bit that reminds me most of Harry Potter - them gryffindors are all about the courage. Anyway, our heroine and family belongs to the selfless faction, but when she reaches the age of sixteen she gets to choose her faction. If she chooses any other faction than her own, she’ll be cutting most ties with her family. People who change faction are not well liked.
Annnnd that’s all I’m going to say about the plot. Because if I said anything more, it would ruin the book. The blurb is equally evasive and I can’t help but applaud that decision. You really should know as little about this book before you dive in. Because even our heroine’s choice in faction is not certain.
That said, some of the reveals are easy to see coming but it didn’t ruin my enjoyment one iota. They weren’t big plot points, just bits about characters that I guessed sometime in advance of the reveal. The main reveal was pretty well camouflaged.
My only real complaint would be that the build up to the ending was very short and not particularly large. That said I’m eagerly awaiting the second book, out on the first of May.

By Light Alone by Adam Roberts

It hate it when something I'm really looking forward to manages to dissapoint me so completely.

The premise of 'By Light Alone' is so intriguing, so well thought out that I had to buy it. It sounded like a novel I could really enjoy. The basic premise: a science, wherein people can grow hair that synthesises food from the sun, rendering hunger a thing of the past, has been implemented some time in the past. Food is scarce but the rich still eat real food because they can. In the midst of this, a rich man’s daughter is kidnapped and, for a year, lives as one of the poor, with long photosynthising hair.

All of that you can learn from the blurb. Sound interesting? You bet! What changes has this wrought upon the girl, how does this effect the world in which she lives in?
Not a lot. Without going into too much detail, Robert’s book is not one for people who like fast paced, page turners. It’s a satire of our society today and rumbles along at the speed of a slug. Just to give some indication, it takes over a hundred pages for the text of the blurb to be played out, in which time, I’ve learnt more about the vacuous space that is the main character than I ever wanted to.

For a book so rich in its premise, there is a very meagre amount of actual plot. What there is, is padded out with drivel about the main character’s day, accompanied by mind-numbing passages of intensely dull philosophical thoughts about love or joy or despair or whatever emotion the character experiencing.

I understand why the information is presented like this. The world the character has grown up in is very different from ours and that is simply how he thinks. Never the less, I find myself skipping entire passages so I can move on with the story. While the thoughts add depth to character, they leech any enjoyment out of the book.
Which brings me around to my main point. Why, with such a blisteringly good idea for a world and plot, did Roberts choose the most boring man to be the main character? Why not the daughter, whose life would be infinitely more interesting to follow? Why not one of the poor, into whose village the young girl is taken? George, the father, has nothing to say, nothing to contribute and doesn’t drag the plot with him as much as flounder after it. Because of his background, brought up in a self-serving privileged society, he is completely unlikeable. I cannot relate to him.

I should point out that if you look up By Light Alone on Google, the reviews that pop up first are full up of praise. And I will admit, I’m not exactly the brightest spark. But a pondering book where most of the action is happening off screen just isn’t for me, not matter how shiny the cover.

If you manage to make it past those first 150 pages, what you’ll find is that Robert somehow manages to make all his characters as dull and vacuous as George. We do get to see the world from the perspective of George’s daughter and the wife. And I dislike all of them. Still, despite the changes of perspective, very little happens. Since the daughter got back from her kidnapping, her parents have split up and the daughter broke the fridge. Annnnnd that’s about it.

I’m just not interested in the emotional side of these people, especially as they’re meant to be horribly selfish. If I’m not supposed to like these people – and indeed I can’t – why should I read this book? I don’t care about them, I can’t see much plot on the horizon, why bother?

And yet, I have kept reading, possible due to the sheer horror than so boring a book could ever be published.

The last chunk of story is through the eyes of Issa who – spoilers, if you care – is actually the daughter, having be given a new name or possibly forgotten her old one. And this is about the only vaguely interesting bit of the book and even then, I’d never rate it more than one out of five. Issa travels from a village – it’s never really explained where she is to begin with - with little to no sense of purpose and occasionally something happens. And yes, we do see the world of the longhairs and how civilisation has changed for them. But Issa’s lack of motivation, her somewhat hazy personality and Roberts’s brain meltingly boring prose makes it the same turgid brown as the rest of the book. There’s no struggle within Issa, within George or his family to do anything, they just sort of wallow from one event to the next, never really reacting much, never making a difference.

The shame of it all is underneath the weight of all this rubbish, there is a story and it is amazing. It’s unique and original. It could a diamond and sparkle like the stars. But the diamond is coated in substances best left to the imagination so you’ll never see the twinkles.

Lost Girl

If you’ve seen the trailer for Lost Girl you’ve probably not really got anything about the show other than that the main character is a succubus. Which is a shame because it’s a whole lot more than that.
In my last article, I was bemoaning (again) the fact that no series I’d watched recently had managed to make a good pilot episode. There needs to be a simple introduction of characters but with enough information on each to understand their basic traits – this girl is the one who knits the group together, that boy enjoys arguing. The characters must also be likeable, even if they’re evil. The plot of the first episode should put the main character/s into the new situation that will set up the series but not in an obvious way. Lost Girl does that quite well, adding a main and side character into the new world without turning into forty minutes of clichés.
Said world is the main bit that gets missed from that trailer. There are two mob-like groups of fae, made up of the general bag of supernatural characters. One group is called ‘the light’, the other ‘the dark’. Exactly what each side stands for isn’t explained in the pilot. I suspect it could be something akin to the state of affairs in Night Watch where one group controls the night and one the day. Or, it could be more simple than that – light equals good, dark equals bad. Anyway, entry into one of these groups is mandatory for all fae, including the succubus, Bo, who has no idea what she is until the supernatural’s doctor tells her. Since not knowing what you are is unheard of, they immediately subject her to a ‘trial’ followed by a command to choose a side – light or dark. I won’t tell you what happens, but fair to say it got my interest.
Their inclusion of the side character, Kenzi, a human kleptomaniac with a side order of kooky, is perhaps the best part. It’s a small stroke but it adds so much and her relationship with Bo is already fun to watch. Because both are outsiders, I don’t get the ‘audience surrogate’ feel. And, the fact that she’s not some ordinary shop worker who gets pulled into the mix through no fault of her own – Rose Tyler, for instance – means she’s a character who’s forging her own path, not simply trailing in the wake of Bo.
Obviously, it could all go wrong and turn out to be awful from episode two onwards but I have high hopes for Lost Girl and I’m really interested to see where they take it.