Allegiant, Day 2

Hoooooo boy.


My first instinct when starting to compose this post in my head was to say, "Nothing really happened in today's reading." But then I immediately thought, "Well, that would be a staggering untruth."


A more accurate one-sentence summary of today's reading would be that nothing really violent happened in today's reading. Only one named character died, which sounds much more violent now than I'm writing it out than it felt while reading it (which should tell you a lot about this series). After a bunch of action in the first two chapters, including a dead-of-night escape from oppression, some lying (but nowhere near as much as is usually present in the books), and the shootout which resulted in the one character's death, there was a long span of no action whatsoever.


Here's why: throughout the first two books, everything took place within the limits of a city clearly recognizable as a very rundown version of Chicago to anyone who went into the series knowing the most famous facts about Chicago's layout and/or the book series. Every character just assumed that there was nothing, or at least very little, beyond Chicago.


Then, about a hundred pages before where I currently am, all the surviving principal characters left Chicago and were introduced into a massive scientific compound situated in a converted O'Hare International Airport. Since then, the book has been composed mostly of long passages of expository conversation occasionally interrupted by interludes of character development. All sorts of interesting facts have been revealed, like what's been going on in the rest of the country while a select group live in a dystopia in Chicago, and why they were in Chicago, and why the factions were created (the real reason being slightly different from the reason given in the first book), and what Divergence is (the real definition being extremely different from any and all of the definitions given in the first two books), and what Tris's mother's backstory actually is (which is quite different from the one given in the first book), and that a main character who we thought was Divergent isn't actually Divergent, and why there was a select group of people living in a dystopia, and that there are several different such groups living in different sorts of dystopias, and for goodness's sake, Veronica, could you possibly give us a chapter or two to process this mess of information?


Basically, Veronica Roth has created an entirely new world that in many ways collides discordantly with the one she originally wrote, and the sudden inrush of new explanations and revelations is so staggering that it's left me a bit numb, hence my initial thought of "nothing happened", when in fact more has probably happened narrative-wise in the last hundred pages than in the entirety of the first two books. In the end, I have only two real thoughts to share.


First, I'm realizing how mistrustful all the teen literature I've been reading lately has made me. I've talked briefly in the past about a book series I've been reading and enjoying called Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children. Yesterday I finished the second book, and spoiler alert, but after 300 pages of me vainly attempting to guess how the book was going to end but assuming that it was going to be more of a hopeful, "on-to-the-next-step" sort of cliffhanger than a "what-the-heck-just-happened" sort, a plot twist that I didn't see coming at all involving a traitor in the main characters' midst rapidly resulted in all but three main characters falling into the dastardly clutches of the nearly undefeatable villains, with definitely one and probably two of those remaining three left mere hours from dying horribly. The end. And the author is slow, so it'll likely be two or three years before book three comes out. Add to that lovely experience my recent reading of Across the Universe, in which every book contained at least one traitor and at least two shocking twists, and last summer's reading of The Hunger Games, which wasn't as bad but contained plenty of unexpected developments, and of course the fact that I've just read the first two Divergent books, and you'll find that the point I'm slowly but surely leading up to it that I don't trust anyone in this new scientific compound. Seriously. It's still a little too early in the book for a shocking twist, but after a certain point I know I'll be starting every scene just waiting for someone to whip out a gun or inject someone with something or say, "Ha! Everything we told you in those 100 expository pages was a lie!" or "I am your father!"


Paranoia. It makes reading books so much more fun (note my sarcasm).


And second, was this really a good idea?


I understand that the exposition is necessary. Tris and friends' dystopian existence has never really been explained, and it's undeniably nice to finally have some understanding of the society Tris lives in. But after the first book, which didn't have a ton of plot but had plenty of action and a certain amount of suspense, and then the second book, which was essentially just nonstop drama, plot, and fighting, it's a bit weird to have everyone just meandering around a remodeled airport chatting with scientists who appear completely trustworthy to the kinds of people who don't read much modern teen literature. I know it's the calm before the storm and that chaos, betrayal, yelling, and screaming, will probably be reintroduced into the story quite soon. And really, the information isn't even uninteresting. It's just that there's tons of it, and I can easily imagine a reader who had come to expect certain things of this series getting majorly bogged down in the section I'm currently in.


To conclude, one other thing which has been notably absent from this expository section is the maddeningly constant repetition of the phrase "I can't breathe". If there is any aspect of Veronica Roth's writing that I feel I can freely criticize, it is the fact that in pretty much every scene in which Tris is afraid of something, she stops breathing. Perhaps even more maddening is how often heartbeats are mentioned in various different ways. "My heart beats faster than......" "The pain throbs like a second heartbeat." "I can feel my heartbeat in my fingertips." "My heartbeat is as loud as......" Etc., etc., etc. Today's reprieve from the constancy of these two concepts has been very nice, but I feel it can't possibly last much longer.


Oh well.


TTFN.


~Pearl Clayton