Delirium (2011)

I’m further expanding my knowledge of young-adult dystopian literature with Lauren Oliver’s Delirium trilogy.  Unlike its more well-known sisters The Hunger Games and Divergent, this series, so far, seems to be following more the 1984/The Giver route, by which I mean it’s less action-heavy and more about the internal journey of its protagonist.

In Delirium, the U.S. has closed its borders to the rest of the world, and the cities within it are well-regulated police states cut off from one another; between the established metro areas is the ungoverned “Wilds.”  The isolation is an attempt to lessen the spread and influence of amor deliria nervosa, the disease that’s charged with the blame for all the world’s problems.  War, greed, self-harm, irrationality, hate, and depravity are all purported to follow directly from the deliria.  In adults, the disease can be cured through a surgical procedure, but it’s unsafe to perform on minors, and Lena Haloway is only 17.  With a history of the disease in her family, she counts down the days until she can be cured.

And just what is amor deliria nervosa?  The name is a giveaway:  it’s love.  In Lena’s tiny world, healthy citizens are cured when they come of age.  They receive their future spouse from a government-approved list of compatible matches, they have their designated number of children, and they go through life free from obsession, lust, and heartbreak.  Lena has grown up indoctrinated on all fronts – school, science, and religion – about the horrors of the deliria.  Romeo and Juliet is a sobering cautionary tale (which cracks me up, because it’s so true,) the children of the deliria-stricken “unmatched” are born twisted and malformed, and if the disease is allowed to take root, the sufferer will die.  It took her mother from her when she was a child, and she avoids the illegal and unlit places where it festers.

(Gee, I wonder if she’s gonna fall in love?)  Right – no real surprises about the main thrust of this series, but the path it takes to get there is interesting.  As Lena feels her heart tugging her out of line, as she starts to crave the deliria as much as she fears it, she faces up to the lies on which her culture operates.  She begins to understand the true nature of the deliria, the strict ordinances put in place to protect her from it, and the purportedly-savage, uncured “Invalids” who live outside the borders of society. 

Like I said, while there’s some action, it’s really not a shoot-‘em-up story.  Instead, it’s about a girl discovering the truth of love and being confronted with the fact that she’s everything she’s been taught is untenable.  The book has a great undercurrent of tension, as Lena fights to resist evidence she can’t ignore, as the longing at the center of her can’t help but try to dismantle her lifetime of programming.  Lauren Oliver, who delivers some compelling prose, has clearly worked to create a world whose internal structure feels well-rendered.  The small details, the terminology, and the chapter-opening quotes (all propaganda on the deliria, from sources as varied as textbooks, religious texts, and childhood nursery rhymes) all add tremendously to the picture she draws of the trilogy’s society.

Warnings

Thematic elements, violence, swearing, drinking, and sexual references.