Divided Kingdom
Posted by
Kevin
Taking the advice of Matt Cheney, I picked up Divided Kingdomby Rupert Thompson. This is an interesting book whose power and pleasure is more in the execution than the theme or the plot. The premise of the book is that the United Kingdom has been split into four kingdoms, with the people reassigned to live in a give land based upon their personalities. The kingdoms are color coded based upon the ancient conceit of humors. Greens are melancholy, Yellows are aggressive, Blues are emotional and Reds are even-tempered and optimistic. There are also people who fit into no class and are free to roam through all the countries. they are referred to as the White People and they are completely outside of society.
The story is simple enough. It follows the journey of one Red sector government official as he first decides to abandon his country for the Blue sector and then tries desperately to get back home, requiring travels through all the sectors and, eventually, with the White People. It will come as no surprise to learn that the protagonist discovers within himself each of the primary emotions that defines each of the individual sector, nor that when he joins the almost animal like White People, the process of abandoning all emotions turns him, well, animal like. As I said, there is no unusual or unexpected theme in this aspect of the book, but there is considerable pleasure in the experience. There is enough tension regarding the physical safety of the hero and his companions to keep the story flowing and the writing is superb. Thomson layers detail upon detail that are both dreamlike and unmistakably human. The process by which the protagonist becomes a full fledged member of the nation he currently inhabits is entirely believable, with each past personality sliding inevitably and clearly into the next. The interactions between people of different nations are tinged with a completely believable level of bigotry and contempt, flowing in all directions. Some characters are aware of that bigotry but even they have a hard time escaping the trap of other people’s expectations. Despite the outlandishness of the central conceit and the gaping flaws in the explanations of how the society now functions, everything feels emotionally true.
In some respects, the fact that Thompson hasn’t bothered to try to make all the aspects of his new society believable adds to the emotional power of the book. It reads almost like a dream in some respects, and that quality allows Thompson to use everything from the shape of the land to the politics of the rather implausibly drawn “resistance” to the physical manifestations of national grief — monuments and museums — to construct his tale. It isn’t a page turned in the classical sense, and people looking for a traditional dystopia in the manner of Huxley or Orwell are going to be disappointed. But if you are interested in people, and how they deal with lose and the processes by which they become fully human, Divided Kingdom should be on your reading list.
