Just before the summer break, several sixth-form students established a book club. We are calling ourselves The Book Club. One of the first choices is Victoria Aveyard's Red Queen, the first in a new series aimed at readers of The Hunger Games, Divergent, and other such recent sf/fantasy/dystopian YA novels. The reader enters a world in which socio-political hierarchy is demarcated by blood-type, which is easily identified by colour: red for the common-folk, silver for the super-powered, ruling elite. Mare Barrow, a poor red thief, survives what should be a fatal fall into an electric force-field. Instead of being fried, Mare harnesses the electricity – handy, this, for she is able, as she dusts herself off from the fall, to deflect an attack of sharp metal doohickies being telekinetically chucked at her by a magnetron (a silver able to manipulate metal). Circumstances are such that the revelation of Mare’s powers disrupts a royal ceremony that is being live broadcast, and so she cannot be quietly disappeared (as would normally happen when a red threatens the status quo). To maintain the social order, Mare is taken in by the palace, and trained to be a silver and a royal; the propaganda campaign around Mare presents her as an orphaned silver raised by reds. And so our protagonist narrator negotiates the parallel worlds of the silver haves and the red have-nots, as well as the spring tide of her affections for the brother princes Maven (to whom Mare is betrothed; seems like a nice fellow, but is he really?) and Cal (the eldest, destined one day to be king; seems like a nice fellow, but is he really?). Along the way, Mare joins Red Dawn, a group of red freedom fighters demanding red-silver equality and willing to take violent action to achieve it.
Aveyard is a young author and screen-writer, whose career has started apace: talk is of an RQ movie, to be helmed (perhaps) by Elizabeth Banks; RQ was sold as part of a three-book deal (part II was published earlier this year, and there are two novellas collected in Cruel Crown; part III is slated for release early 2017); she has sold a screenplay with which Stan Lee is involved. When it was published last year, RQ quickly became the bestseller on the New York Times YA list, for what are probably unsurprising reasons. The novel rattles along from start to finish – novels are neither short nor long by dint of page-numbers alone, and this is a short 380-or-so pages – and it is an easy fit for the post-Hunger Games, post-Divergent, dystopia-saturated YA market. Technically, however, the book has its problems. As a genre work, RQ is thinly conceptualized. A case in point: late in the novel, a secret underground train is being used. Not a huge leap of imaginative faith. The secret underground train is called “the undertrain.” At the back of the Orion edition being sold in the UK, there is an interview in which Aveyard says she wishes she’d got a better handle on the science of the world she’s drawn, so perhaps she has an inkling that the genre aspect of the book could be fleshed out a little. But the undertrain is not indicative of a deficit of scientific learning. Rather, it suggests a misplaced sense of how to draw lines of distinction and parallel between the worlds of reader and narrative. Simply renaming old or current tech, unless part of a broader strategy (the linguistic marking, say, of parallel or alternative cultural development), suggests that a writer’s engagement with her chosen genre is dismissive or undervalued, as if genre is mere window dressing (in fact, there are passages in Aveyard’s interview that do point to such an attitude). But there is more to genre writing than stylistic dress-up. It is something like the difference articulated by Wesley Snipes’s Noxeema, in Too Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, between being a drag queen and merely a boy in a dress (a distinction that, sadly, Noxeema understands but Snipes can’t quite inhabit). There are stylistic issues, too. One is the overuse of italics to indicate significant thoughts. This may just be a slightly stuffy, teacherly bias, but I think there is more to it. As I push on through the novel, I find myself dealing with a first-person narrative, which unfolds in the “real time” of the present tense. The presence on almost every page of clauses and sentences bearing the italic stamp of added emotional weight strikes me as redundant, uneconomical, and untrusting of the reader. The narrative is so heavily and repeatedly signposted that it is less emotionally involving than it is merely repetitive; it virtually bars me from doing any of the work that is part of the joy of reading; it turns Mare – whom I think we are supposed to read as a literary daughter of Katniss Everdeen – into a merely self-centred girl, whose apparently political anger is in fact a tendency for caprice reminiscent of Chris Kattan’s Mango from Saturday Night Live. Linguistic choices also rankle. Almost as frequent as italicization is “smirking.” Characters smirk so often one wonders if one has forgotten how to use the word and perform the action: people smirk when they are being kind, cruel, deceitful, sharing a moment. The heart beats literal and metaphorical time far too often: Mare’s heart is aflutter throughout, but decisions are also made repeatedly in the beat of a heart. Adverbs and adverbially placed prepositions abound – things are rarely done, they are done x-ly; or, rather than continuing, Mare will continue on – in ways that add to the bagginess of the prose. Some choices are just incoherent: words are “hissed,” though they are entirely without sibilance; the moonlight itself “bathes” things in purple and black (as opposed to its light casting shadows). Such complaints are not “mere” pedantry: John Green and Suzanne Collins are YA writers who know their craft, and Aveyard, who is, as I’ve mentioned, a young and new writer, has plenty of time to learn hers. Her first novel has a marketable story, but is in need of an editor who thinks beyond sales, who is willing to help hone the work and stop the writer from trying to push eight eighths of the iceberg above water. |
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