Lucien has done his best to survive since his parents
died, for his baby brother Cole’s sake. Surviving in the dystopian world of Usofa
is an achievement of itself with the brutal police, health destroying work,
lack of food and disease
And recruitment. Recruitment means a few young people are chosen to be the next rank of Imposers, the elite military/police. Forced through a series of terrible trials, forced to compete with the threat of a sadistic death on their loved ones – Lucien must win if his brother is to survive. But his winning means someone else must lose – and their family must die.
Including Digory, the recruit who Lucian is growing ever
closer to – as their relationship grows closer the inevitable tragedy looks all
the more bleak.
The main thing that bothers me about this book is the
whole concept of Recruitment and the Culling because it doesn’t make much sense
to me
Making people compete in games for amusement’s sake or
punishment, even holding the lives of their loved ones as hostages and forcing
them to compete viciously makes sense – in a sadistic evil kind of way. It
would be another Hunger Games
parallel (a very very close parallel), and it would make sense. So it makes
sense that Digory and Lucien would be thrown into the games – both are there to
be tortured. To be forced to work with people they would then be forced to turn
on, to force people to murder their loved ones, to murder each other’s loved
ones – and each of those deaths to be utterly awful, terrible demises? Yes, as
the terrible oppression of an evil regime, that works
However, this whole system isn’t designed to punish
traitors or force compliance. It’s designed to recruit the uber elite
soldier/police, the Imposers. Now, should I ever manage to rule my own
Sparkyocracy, I think I will skip recruiting my elite guard from people I
brutally torture. How is this even remotely a sensible idea? Why have a
recruitment process for your elite (who you then train to be dangerous and,
presumably, give the shiny lethal toys and the high level access) involve
tormenting them in ways that would make them despise the Establishment and
everything it stands for? Hey, let’s ensure we get a loyal elite guard by
making them torture their own parents to death! That’s bound to work? It’s
supposed to be an incentive to make them compete extra hard but that itself
fails because several of the trials require teamwork. So not only are you
training all these new recruits to hate the Establishment, but also training
your elite guard to be utterly incapable of actually working together.
This does not seem productive
