Allegiant (2013)

I finished the last book in the Divergent trilogy a few days ago, and I’m still not sure what I think of it.  I appreciate that it really branches out and changes the scope of the series.  Sometimes, it pays off to take a series to unexpected places, which certainly happens here.  However, even in new locales with different crises, it trots out some of the same old plot elements without approaching them in novel ways, and I’m still flummoxed by the ending.  Having reached the end of the trilogy, I’m not left with a “Wow!” or an “Ugh!” – more of a “Hmmm…”  (Spoilers ahead for the series.)

Insurgent ends with a bang – the long-awaited information that infuriating characters had been dangling in front of Tris (and me) for the entire book.  The big bombshell?  Their whole society is a lie, a behavioral modification experiment/genetic sifting bowl cooked up by a bunch of scientists in the post-apocalyptic but still-functioning world beyond the city limits.  The rites and rituals of the faction system are merely constructs, and outside eyes have been monitoring and manipulating the city’s residents for generations.  No factions on the other side of the fence, but when Tris and a small party of citizens venture out of the city, they discover a new social divide.  Tris and other Divergent folk are considered part of the GP (genetically pure) elite, while those who fit nicely into a single faction are GD (genetically damaged) – menial-labor material at best, criminally depraved at worst.  Tris and co. try to find their footing in the outside world, navigate the new order of the day, and wrestle with how they can help the city from the outside.

Complaints first.  The whole series has a penchant for pulling the rug out from under Tris and the reader, and it maybe does it a bit too much here.  Particularly on the subject of Tris’s mom, this book undoes a lot of big revelations Tris already had about her in earlier books, which makes the earlier stuff feel like a waste of time (plus, I think it’s more interesting if Mrs. Prior wasn’t up to her eyeballs in all the conspiracy whatnots.)  I’m also not a fan of the way the narrative is split between Tris and Four, her hunky-but-angsty boyfriend.  There’s a practical reason for it, but it doesn’t work for me, and the ending especially is just too much Four.  I won’t get into the ins and outs of whether things should have gone down like they did, but if I were writing it, I’d have positioned it so Tris’s big climax was much closer to the end and truncated the fallout/epilogue.  Finally, there’s just too much rebellion.  It’s not continuing clashes against one corrupt/unjust authority; it’s several micro-revolutions all mixed together, and it gets repetitive and unspecific.  (Oh, and why did the scientists think that setting up a bunch of diametrically-opposed factions-before-blood sects that engender mistrust and resentment was a good way to maintain peace?)

On the other hand I find a lot of the existential “my life is literally a science experiment” stuff pretty interesting, and I like a lot of Tris’s internal conflict as she explores the outside world and her place in it.  I appreciate that the book addresses dubious moral choices within a rebellion, the idea that being oppressed doesn’t give you carte blanche to return an eye for an eye, but in the end, it sort of drops the ball on the whole idea.  The GP vs. GD thing intrigues me, and though I’m not crazy about the ending, I’m pretty satisfied with the specific circumstances of it.

Warnings

Violence, light sexual content, and disturbing elements.