K-SCORE: 14
Author: Veronica Roth
Spoiler Level: Major, totally ruining
“80% characters talking about the given circumstances either internally or through dialogue, 10% advancing those circumstances through violence, 5% descriptions of what people are wearing, 4% Tris and Tobias kissing, and then 1% everything else a novel can do”
I’ve already done some extensive complaining about this series. I had an open mind for all of Divergent and went into Insurgent tentatively optimistic (knowing that I wasn’t the target audience) in spite of Divergent’s terrible ending. The whole series is like a man who falls from a tree. In Divergent he’s at the top of the tree, developing false beliefs about the stability of a number of the branches up there, enjoying a decent view, and then he slips, crunching his balls in the place where his feet just betrayed him. Then in Insurgent he lolls to the side in pain and starts tumbling. Twigs fly up and cut his face and arms, he cracks his spine on the thicker limbs lower down, and keeps tumbling. There’s a long way to go. So Allegiant really delivers the product I expected. He falls the final fifteen feet to the dirt ground with a simple thud and lies there. Dead. You’re not sure where in his fall he actually died, but looking at his corpse, the outcome is obvious. Part of you feels bad for him, and part of you thinks, well, what the hell was he doing up there? He had no climbing experience and there was never any good reason to be up that high anyway.
“No one asks questions about what life is like in the world beyond!”
I’d rather not dredge up all the failings of Insurgent that are still present in Allegiant so it might be helpful to have read that review before this one. Veronica Roth piles on game-breaking features and dull character onto existing story problems.
Nothing in the novel is as bad as the plot. How hard is it to plan (at least loosely) for three books? None of these novels are very long. Yet it became clear that Roth didn’t have an understanding of what would happen in Allegiant when she wrote Divergent, and being as Allegiant is supposed to tell a story that explains the dystopia and decides its fate, that’s a pretty big problem. She even admits as much in the “Interview with Veronica Roth” in the bonus materials. She created the character of David, long after she decided to kill off Tris’s parents. That means everything that connects his backstory to Tris’s mother’s was a new fabrication in Roth’s mind. Presumably Natalie, Tris’s mother, behaves in Divergent according to those previous life experiences, but Roth didn’t know them when she writing those behaviors. It’s like baking a dessert by mixing a number of random ingredients together and then deciding after it comes out of the oven, “by the way, that’s creme brulee.” If you say so, Roth, but it tastes like shit.
Tris’s mother and David are just examples, though, of the disaster that comes from having had no idea what the third novel in this three-book series would entail. In Allegiant, Tris, Tobias, Caleb, Cara, Peter, and Uriah, leave the city for the first time in their lives, with no knowledge of what exists in the outside world. They don’t know how their city came to be so isolated, they don’t have a sense of scale of the size of the world, or how many other people are out there, or what their societies are like, what kind of knowledge they have, what human history is like, what technologies, luxuries, or governments they have. They know nothing. They’re picked up immediately by the outsiders (so no exploration of the land, or survival in the natural settings, or struggles to physically find people given the immensity of the area they have to look) and a bunch of new people quickly explain in language and terms they can understand that their city is one of many, that their is a lot of land on Earth, and that they’ve all been part of an experiment. I’ll get into the experiment in a bit. In that section, those few chapters, Tris is upset that the people outside have been watching them with video cameras that they also use on themselves inside the city. Tobias is upset that the faction system, which he has never liked that much, doesn’t mean what he thought it meant. Nobody asks to look at the map again! No one asks questions about what life is like in the world beyond! The immediate acceptance of societies beyond everything they’ve ever known and the focus on insignificant details of the compound set up in O'hare airport were beyond confusing. They made for one of the most pathetic chapters of any book I’ve ever read.
“It quickly became clear that these new people with more generic midwestern white people names (adding David, Zoe, Matthew, George, Reggie, Amy, another Jack, a Violet, and a Nita (ooh la la) to the mix) are as dumb as anyone in the city.”
“Roth did no research on genetics.”
It quickly became clear that these new people with more generic midwestern white people names (adding David, Zoe, Matthew, George, Reggie, Amy, another Jack, a Violet, and a Nita (ooh la la) to the mix) are as dumb as anyone in the city. They are scientists with memory-erasing serums, death serums (both shameful plot devices) and the ability to watch and listen to any detail of anything going on in Chicago, and they are running an experiment with no purpose, with so many shifting variables that no useful information can be gleaned from whatever happens, so internally destructive it can’t be good for anyone, with a confused concept to begin with, and they’ve been doing it for many generations. Through all of Allegiant Tris and Tobias and their friends are constantly talking about people that are “genetically damaged” and people that are “genetically pure” and this thing called The Purity War, which is the reason it’s all dystopian. Yet Roth did no research on genetics. “GD” and “GP” might as well be filler for black and white, which was what she wanted to discuss, but presumably genetic damage that was inflicted on subsects of the population by governments of yore would manifest in specific ways. It didn’t. The nature versus nurture debate in this series that includes genetic manipulation is identical to how it exists now. And everyone seemed to want to cure genetic damage, which I guess was somehow linked to the Chicago experiment, yet no one ever discussing an actual aim for doing that. Matthew says he’s angry at the Bureau of Genetic Welfare because they didn’t let him date (I guess) the girl he loved because she was damaged and they didn’t want Matthew and the girl having children. He says to Tris, “We’re supposed to make sure that we match ourselves with ‘optimal’ partners so we produce genetically superior offspring, or something.” (427) That “or something” is my favorite. That’s the geneticist in the story! And anyone who’s even briefly studied Tudor England or Bernese Mountain Dogs knows that spreading genes around is what is healthiest for a given population. If anything, the mandate should be the opposite.
“There are no old people, no children, no twenty-year-olds or thirty-year-olds. There’s no economy, no routines, no necessary maintenance, no one who isn’t free to talk to Tris and Tobias about what’s going on whenever they want.”
Even if the world had an acceptable origin, even if the plot made sense, even if it wasn’t filled with memory-erasing MacGuffins and death serums of which Tris is immune, even if the genetic components had been well-researched, the plot would have been a complete failure again for continuing the trends of Divergent and Insurgent of having all of the characters be either adolescents or forty-something adults, the proper age to be parents of adolescents, and having everything happen in a span of weeks. At one point Tobias chooses the losing side on yet another mini rebellion. He does so a few days after finding out about the outside world, settling into the O’hare airport compound, and meeting his co-conspirators. When it flops, he is sentenced to a year of community service. It was the only time reading the novel I laughed aloud. As if Roth would ever let more than a couple days pass in her story before killing off a new character or sending a bunch of people under some meaningless banner (Dauntless, Erudite, Allegiant, The Bureau, The Factionless, Fringers, whatever) at each other with guns. Tris and Tobias discover the compound, become two of the most important people in the compound, thwart an overthrow of the compound, and overthrow the compound themselves within the course of a few weeks. David is essentially the only compound leader, Matthew the only scientist doing any work, Nita and Reggie the rebels. The few straggling characters exist to die. There are no old people, no children, no twenty-year-olds or thirty-year-olds. There’s no economy, no routines, no necessary maintenance, no one who isn’t free to talk to Tris and Tobias about what’s going on whenever they want. It all makes the world feel underpopulated, and it adds a level of danger to the impulsiveness of these teenagers because there aren’t enough people to keep dying like this. If you take Roth’s list of character names, her rate of character death, and the duration of time of the plot, everyone would be dead in a matter of a couple months. So I assume the “two and half years later” epilogue is post-mortem vision of whomever was the last to take a gunshot wound to the chest, or stand too close to an explosion.
All of the complaints I had after Insurgent about world-building, simplistic or nonexistent descriptions, interchangeable characters, and transposed modern language still stand. The problems are exacerbated in Allegiant, which I didn’t even think was possible. It’s because Tobias has first-person chapters in Allegiant and he sounds just like Tris. It’s awful. I kept having to flip back and check the chapter heading to remind myself who was speaking. They have the same breakdown of how they tell their stories: 80% characters talking about the given circumstances either internally or through dialogue, what might happen, what did happen, what it means… that kind of thing, 10% advancing those circumstances through violence, 5% descriptions of what people are wearing, 4% Tris and Tobias kissing, and then 1% everything else a novel can do (world description, character description, genuine conversation between characters, foreshadowing, thematic exploration, description of small actions that illuminate character, place, or relationships, etc.). It’s not a healthy ratio.
The story surprised me at the end. Veronica Roth aims high with the messages inherent to her series, and the notions she cares most about appears to be the importance of courage and the varieties of courage that exist. So if there is a place I can respect Allegiant it’s in the final fifty pages when she kills off Tris. I didn’t think she would. Mostly because the idea of Tris sacrificing herself had already been thoroughly explored and bypassed in Insurgent when she went to the Erudite compound to stop Jeanine Matthews. The girl just really wanted to die; she’s so unwise, so irresponsible, so violent, so impulsive. It was 1500 pages of (admittedly pages with only about 50% more words per page than appear on Go Dog Go pages) of self-destructive behavior from that girl, and finally she found something that got her. It’s really sad because, despite what Roth might think, her death means very little. The story doesn’t work in any way, and the only thing I was convinced of was that adults cannot let these kids behave with such unchecked recklessness lest they hurt themselves and others, and finally this girl who wanted to be a good person but didn’t really have the understanding or temperance for it, gets killed. She gets shot by another misguided soul; she left her gun behind for no reason and could have found a way around the situation with better planning or more convenient plot twists. It’s depressing. It’s not exactly that I disagreed with the messages Roth was sending about progress, about divisions in society, about courage and sacrifice, but I wasn’t convinced she’d found anything close to an acceptable avenue to explore them. But, I can at least respect that Roth had the courage to make such a bold choice for Tris’s fate.
This series was surprisingly hard to review, harder and harder over time. There is a great deal wrong with the structure of the novels, the exploration of the premise, the characters both in their similarities to one another and in their authenticity, the language itself, and of course the plot, which is a huge mess. The challenge was because A) so many people have found a connection to these stories that I’m trying to understand and B) Roth very badly wants the series to be all of those things that it’s not. She has the courage to write, that’s for sure, but not the patience for it. I’d advise her on future projects to slow down, plan and plot far in advance, and find a reader who knows to cut things like this:
“I shouldn’t be worried about his verdict. It’s already decided. All of Jeanine’s closest associates will be executed.
Why do you care? I ask myself. He betrayed you. He didn’t try to stop your execution.
I don’t care. I do care. I don’t know.”