Title: Divergent
Author: Veronica Roth
Publisher: Harper Collins/
Rating: WARTY!
Okay, this book is a little weird, but props to Roth for two things; no prologue, and she gets into the thick of it from the off even though the off is disturbingly like The Hunger Games! Roth is another fellow Blogspot-er, so I appear to be in distinguished company here, although again, I don't know her. I have to confess to having serious misgivings about this book the first time I saw the cover since it seemed to me to be far too much like a rip-off of The Hunger Games with its circular emblem on a darker background, especially since some HG covers have the emblem burning. Reading the blurb only served to confirm my distaste for those who rip-off successful novels instead of digging down to find something original. But as I thought about it and read what others had said about it, I decided to give it a chance and see if it could win me over.
The story is about a future time in Chicago when, after a destructive war of which we learn nothing, society has for unknown reasons, split into five factions. How having five "factions" is supposed to promote unity is a mystery, but the ostensible reason we're offered is that these factions resulted in an opposites repel kind of approach, each faction the result of a reaction to what people considered to be the cause of the war: selfishness, antagonism, dishonesty, fear, and ignorance. So the five factions which resulted were: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, and Erudite. It’s a pity one motivating factor wasn't putting each faction on an equal footing; if it had been, then the factions might have been: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntlessness, and Erudition. But perhaps that's just me! Note that failure to get into a faction means you're homeless: forced to live in the streets with little care or concern given to you - not even by the Abnegation or Amity factions! That struck a sour note.
Just like in The Hunger Games, the story begins with the family readying themselves for the selection process. In this case it's a complete family, 1950's style: Dad, Mom, older son, younger daughter, all of the Abnegation faction. The kids are Beatrice Prior, and her brother Caleb (fortunately not with a 'K'!), and they aren’t selected by lottery; they get to choose which faction they will belong to, even if it’s not their own, but their choice is limited by the testing they receive the day before selection. Beatrice (who changes her name shortly after to Tris, which I shall use from here on out) is nervous.
Her test is really interesting and when she completes it, the tester - not from her own faction by design - is concerned. Tris learns that she has eliminated only two of the other factions, not four as should have happened. This makes her a 'divergent', which means she has far more choice than almost everyone else, but is also a pariah if this news gets out. She could become Candor or Dauntless, or she could remain Abnegation. She can’t decide at first, but quickly eliminates Candor when she realizes she tells lies way too readily. It’s pretty obvious which she's going to choose, but she's made more nervous when her brother unexpectedly rejects Abnegation and chooses Erudite! Nevertheless, she fights against self-imposed pressure to stay 'home' after Caleb's choice, and she selects Dauntless. Big surprise - not!
This means that she must leave the ceremony with the Dauntless faction. She cannot speak to her parents, now effectively childless and she may never see them again. She does note as she leaves, that her father appears furious but her mother is smiling, behind him. From this point on she's an initiate and is being tested, the first test of which is to jump onto the moving train which will take them to Dauntless HQ. One boy is too chicken to do so and is left behind, relegated to the factionless aka homeless, but the rest of them climb on. A half hour later they must jump from the moving elevated train onto the roof of a building. Tris holds hands with another initiate (from Candor) and they jump together, successfully. One girl fails to the ground several stories below. At this point, they’re told they have to jump from the rooftop into a black hole without knowing what’s down there. Tris, to everyone's amazement, volunteers to be first. She lands in a net and is safe.
They're all taken to a vast cavern under the city. This is their home and their training ground, and training is very rough in the world of the Dauntless. I call it cruel and unusual punishment. The first day they arrive, the recruits have been told that there are only ten places available for that year's entire intake. Why? We're not privileged with that information, but whoever fails to make the cut will be kicked out and become homeless. All the non-Dauntless recruits are stuck in a dorm together, male and female. Many of them cry. Tris herself sobs, but quietly. She has a heck of a lot of adjustments to make coming from such a reserved, restricted, and sheltered background.
Training starts the next day and consists of no training whatsoever. The recruits are simply told what they have to do and then scored on how well they do it. The first task is to fire a handgun at a target. This Tris finally manages to accomplish successfully, and feels good about her success. That afternoon, they’re required to fight each other in a literal knock-out competition. Tris gets a bye the first day. In her fight, Christina surrenders after having the crap beaten out of her, but because she gave in before she gave out, she's required to show she's not really a coward by hanging from her hands on a slippery rail over a precipice leading to a rushing river. She barely survives the ordeal.
The next day Tris has to fight Peter (what an appropriately macho name) the guy who just got through trashing her bed by spraying "Stiff" all over it, which is a derogatory term for anyone from the Abnegation faction. Having seen what happened to Christina, Tris refuses to surrender and fights until she's literally beaten bloody and passes out. I don't know if Roth is trying to outdo Collins in the shock-jock-and-gore factor here, or if she's just really into abusive behavior, but this didn’t work for me, especially not given where Roth is coming from, which I'll go into a little bit, later. Even within the framework of her story, this doesn’t work; first of all, there appears to be no reason to have a Dauntless group, which is supposedly the guardian of the city. What are they guarding against and why do they need to be so "manly" to meet that need? After mentioning this problem very briefly Roth completely abandons it, so either it’s something she's planning on springing later, or she's just really into abusive behavior towards women. All I can say at this point is that Roth better have a huge pay-off lying in wait for me if she's going to make me suffer through this twisted sickness to get there.
Do the Dauntless want to make sure no non-Dauntless people make it into their ranks? Are they hoping those recruits will die off or perform so poorly that they'll be rejected? What training do the Dauntless people get? We have no idea at this point. We do meet two people in this abusive boot camp who are going to factor into Tris's life. 'Four' who is a tough trainer, but not psychotic, and 'Eric' who is definitely psychotic and then some. Unfortunately, Eric is in charge because he's one of the five leaders of the Dauntless faction, believe it or not. I sincerely hope Tris's inevitable love triangle isn’t between her, Four, and Eric.
Divergent comes a bit loose at the seams as I progress: Roth is evidently another YA writer who thinks biceps has a singular, and she rather clumsily telegraphs the growing attraction between Tris and Four.
Tris is threatened and intimidated by Peter, Drew, and Molly, and she's so angry at them that when she has her last fight, she kicks the crap out of Molly. After the first stage of trials is over, the results are posted and Tris is sixth. Edward is first, Peter second, and that night Edward is stabbed in his eye in the dorm. And nothing happens! There's no investigation, no attempt to discover what happened, no concern for the others in the dorm, no apprehension of guilty parties, no trial, no justice. Edward is kicked out(!) and Myra, who came last, leaves voluntarily with him.
Family day comes along and Tris is surprised that her mother shows up, not surprised her father doesn’t. Her mom tells her she can’t see Caleb because the erudite have banned the Abnegation faction from visiting (and apparently none of the factions object to this), but she insists that the first chance Tris gets to visit that faction after initiation, she must tell her brother Caleb to investigate the simulation serum. Que serum, serum, whatever will be, will be, the simulation is scaring me, que serum, serum! Clearly something is wrong with the veritaserum, but why Erudite would let Tris in there given her background is left unexplained. It would be fun if she made her visit wearing Abnegation clothing, but my guess is she won't (OTOH you know how lousy my guesses are, don't you?! - actually, this one turned out to be right for once!).
The Erudite faction continues stepping up their propaganda war against Abnegation by sending out news sheets with nothing but lies in them about what Abnegation is supposed to be doing, and what Tris's father is doing in particular - or was doing with her! There's no response to these lies from any other faction. Tris's mom doesn't stay long but she seems overly familiar with the way Dauntless operates, and Tris realizes that her mom grew up in Dauntless but chose Abnegation.
Tris gets a chance to go on a dare with a bunch of other Dauntless crew, and the dare is to ride to the top of the elevator in the John Hancock building and come back down by means of a massive zip-line to the ground. She does it and loves it. No word on who it is who does the work of generating the electricity which is abundant in the city. No word on who processes the fuel or mines the coal which powers the trains they ride. The Dauntless initiates also get a trip out to the fence to see what goes on there, and Tris notes that the lock is not on the inside, but the outside - like this whole city is a prison and she's one of the inmates. They have a flag war, rather like the one featured in The Lightning Thief which Tris's team wins by taking the flag from Eric's team before his team can take the one from Four's team.
The next phase of initiation begins and in this phase the initiates are repeatedly required to go under sim serum designed to make them hallucinate their worst fears. Tris's are horrible and she suffers greatly from them, but not as much as others do, because at the end of this phase, she is number one. She has been warned by Four to keep a low profile, as indeed her mother had warned her in particular about this phase, but clearly she pays no attention whatsoever to warnings - she's Dauntless, after all! Both Tris's mom and Four somehow know Tris is divergent and she is, more than once, warned by Four that the leaders are watching her closely, and she will be killed if she's discovered to be divergent. No word on why. No word on why this has no effect whatsoever on Tris's behavior!
For her success in phase two, Peter, Al (supposedly her friend), Drew, and Molly try to throw her over the rail into the chasm, but she's rescued by Four, who puts Drew in hospital. After this, Al kills himself. The next phase they must face is a virtual reality of their fears - all of them one after another - and this phase will be watched by the team leaders, after which the initiates will be rejected or they will graduate. Four takes Tris through his own virtual test which is pretty limp. He has only four fears which is why he's called four - the lowest number of fears of anyone in the Dauntless faction, which is pretty sad, but then everyone in dauntless appears to have at least one serious phobia! Four's real name is Tobias, the only Abnegation factioneer to join Dauntless before Tris did. One of his fears was his own father, Marcus, who is evidently a child-beater.
I notice that Roth, as her very first acknowledgment says, "Thank you, God, for your son, and for blessing me beyond comprehension" which itself is beyond comprehension, but for someone who is ostensibly so deeply Christian, I have to ask why she's writing novels of this nature! It comes as no surprise to me: most gun-owners in the USA are Christian after all and evidently they have so little faith in their deity's omnipotence and love that they feel the need to back him up with an unhealthy dose of fire-power, but I am surprised that so few others find Roth's penchant for mindless violence to be out of character and disturbing at best for a YA novel.
The initiates are taken for a trial run on their final fear test (why? I have no idea. They've never been so spoiled in any other aspect of their "training" and their trial run isn't even their own fears - it’s the fears of one of the other trainers - the one who trained the Dauntless initiates. They get one of her fears each, and unfortunately, the one Tris gets happens to be one of her own. She reacts extremely badly to it. Afterwards, she slaps Four in the face and runs out of the building breaking the rules and taking the train to Erudite HQ where she meets with Caleb. Of course, there is no way this will ever attract the attention of the Dauntless leadership!
She passes on her mother's advice to Caleb, to investigate the simulation serum, which is devised and developed by Erudite - who we learn, work very closely with Dauntless, and Eric may well be one of theirs. After being chewed out by the Erudite leader, Tris is escorted back to Dauntless where Eric chews her out, but she plays the weak woman, aided by Four, who claims she tried to kiss him and he rejected her. Eric buys this pathetic, tearful lie and then immediately afterwards, Tris and Four confirm that it's a pathetic lie by meeting in a public place and kissing! As if that wasn’t bad enough, they take off that night and ride the train towards the Erudite compound where they can see them burning the midnight oil - which they're not supposed to do, but if that's the case, why are there empty trains running all night long wasting fuel? Four tells Tris that Erudite are planning a war on Abnegation, to take over the government. This confirms something that her brother had told her earlier, and of course, if the only military faction is Dauntless, who can stand against them? Maybe Tris and Four? After all, their names, when combined, make a Four-Tris....
Well I'm done with this one now and I have to say that it goes to hell in a hand-basket at the end. I already have Insurgent, the sequel on order at the library, so I plan on reading that, and I desperately hope it's better than this one turned out to be! Tris goes through her personal fear simulation and she comes top of the class with only seven fears. She graduates, and Eric tells her everyone is being given an injection so the Dauntless can be tracked wherever they are as a safety feature, but it's really a control chip. That evening all the Dauntless people start marching off like robots, except a tiny handful who are divergents, which, of course, includes Four/Tobias.
Here's where the stupid kicks in. Instead of hiding out in the HQ, tracking down the computer controlling the dauntless crowd and disabling it, Tris and Tobias the tools pretend to be robotic, too, and pointlessly board the train, pointlessly ending up in the Abnegation quarter, where the locals are being gunned down mercilessly. Stupid. Of course, T&T are discovered and captured. Stupid. Tris has a chance to kill Eric but chickens out. Stupid. She gets shot for her generosity. Stupid. Clearly she's not really Dauntless at all.
The two of them are taken to Jeanine, the leader of Erudite who is orchestrating this whole thing. She injects Tobias with another serum which is supposed to control even the Divergents, and it works, so Tobias is carted off to the computer control room where they should have gone in the first place. Tris is put into a tank to drown (why don't they just shoot her?), but she's rescued by her own mother, and amazingly shows surprise that her mother is Dauntless after she had already figured this out several chapters ago! Stupid.
Her mother tells her that a few Abnegations are hiding nearby and on their way there, her mother pointlessly and idiotically sacrifices herself when it's not even remotely necessary to do so. It's entirely predictable and thoroughly stupid. Tris finally wises up to the fact that they need to go to the Dauntless compound and disable the computers. She and her dad and Tobias's dad and Caleb go there. There's a gunfight and her dad gets killed. Entirely predictable and thoroughly stupid.
Another entirely predictable and thoroughly stupid event is that it all comes down to Tobias and Tris, and Tris is so stupid that she never even considers shooting him in the foot like she did with Eric who she had far more reason to outright kill. Instead she lets Tobias point the gun at her own stupid head, and the hell with all the scores upon scores upon scores upon scores of people who will die because she's so absurdly clueless and thoroughly stupid.
But love wins over Tobias and he can't kill her, after which joy of joys they stand around hugging and sighing until they wise up again, and realize that people are dying while the two of them are farting around like thirteen year olds. So Tobias finally, finally trips the trigger and all the Dauntless are back under their own volition. They grab the one hard drive - as thought he word "back-up" got lost during the war they had, and think everything is now hunky dory. Then they run into Tobias's father, who hugs him and now, now, Tris finds some spine and tells him to get away from Tobias, informing him that the only reason she hasn't killed him is because she thinks Tobias ought o be the one to do it. What? I'm sorry but WHAT???? She can't kill Eric who's helping orchestrate the massacre of her own faction, but she could kill Tobias's father?
The ending sucked big time, but before that, before the last sixty pages or so, this story was problematic, but not too awful, so here's the deal: I will not rate this until I read volume two, Insurgent and then I'll rate both of them at the same time and decide if I ever want to read volume 3! Well that decision got made. Volume 2 is so bloody awful that I definitely do not want to read volume 3, nor do I want to see the Divergent movie if it ever gets released!
