Last week I visited a friend who works as the nanny for an 11 year old girl, who is thrilled that I am a writer. She has read all four books of the Divergent series and put on the film for me to view. The girl reminded me rather more of the 11 year old nerds of my youth than any of the females trundling round back then. I was impressed with her intellect, and her seeing of herself as living in alienation from society in much the same way that many boys of my generation did. Her view is inquisitive and defiant and might just be a hint at a future female outlook that is an essentially pseudo-masculine worldview.
In terms of the individual protagonist in Divergent, she reminds me of the lead character in Glory Season, by David Brin, about a woman coming of age in a feminist society, and also the male lead in Orson Scott Card’s Harmony.
Elements of the story fall into line early on:
1. Post apocalyptic
2. Genetically engineered population
3. A rigid consensus-based hierarchy of ideology/lifestyle factions
The last element, which is the key to the thing, that people are slotted into ideological groups such as warriors, monkish Amish types, elite thinkers, and contented workers is so template like and shallow that I suspect it was inspired by roleplaying game alignment and career schemes. The scheme obviously came about in a mind that had never worked in a labor union. However, the story had a useful message about being slotted socially against genetic type and forcibly separated from a nuclear family according to the will of some impersonal system. It does point up the fact that while traditional societies bring the individual into society through the family, that under modernity the individual is most often brought into society through the cutting of familial bonds.
Where the story fails utterly—and overall it seems very well wrought for its target audience—is in its complete misreading of the elements of masculine warrior culture. Of Course the warrior faction is as female as male, but dominated by males. That was a tightrope act in writing those nuances together, which should be recognized for the deft marketing decision it was.
The disconnect, which will prevent any man of physicality to be able to suspend disbelief, is that the dominant male warriors are Hong Kong fuey knockoffs—of the same pale, waxy vapidity common to teenage vampire movies—and most importantly, that the entire warrior society of this ‘dauntless’ faction [which would translate as ‘easy to kill’ to any real warrior society] was that mindless risk taking was the core warrior value. This is an outside-in reading of masculine culture from a feminine viewpoint.
The key aspect of masculine warrior culture is tactical thinking, which is completely bypassed by this author. In speaking to women I am continually amazed at how they only seem to perceive the gross aspects of masculine culture and through a very rigid gender filter. However, since this is a well-written commercial book, this understanding may very well exist in the mind of the author, but was submerged as a sales killer beneath a sea of feminine angst over relationships and wonder at the loud, rampaging, and thoroughly misunderstood, gender that is their opposite.
