Oliver, Lauren: Delirium
Delirium (2011)
Written by: Lauren Oliver
Genre: YA/Dystopia
Pages: 442 (UK ARC)
Why I Read It: When I read and reviewed Ally Condie's Matched and then read Lois Lowry's The Giver just to see how similar those two titles were, another title kept popping up: Lauren Oliver's Delirium. The Condie and the Oliver were published so close together that if you try and say that one author copied the other, you'd reveal your ignorance about how the publishing business works. Still, I was curious about how yet another YA novel was taking a dystopian society and mucking around with marriage, and a wonderful LJ user (I don't want to use her real name in the review) was kind enough to send me her ARC all the way from the UK just so I could read the book and make comparisons. It took me forever to get around to reading it, but read I finally did!
The premise: ganked from the author's website: Before scientists found the cure, people thought love was a good thing. They didn't understand that once love--the deliria--blooms in your blood, there is no escaping its hold.
Things are different now. Scientists are able to eradicate love, and the government demands that all citizens receive the cure upon turning eighteen. Lena Haloway has always looked forward to the day when she'll be cured. A life without love is a life without pain: safe, measured, predictable, and happy.
But with ninety-five days left until her treatment, Lena does the unthinkable: she falls in love.
Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay. Not only do I want to talk about the pros and cons of this particular book, but I want to compare it some to Condie's Matched and Lowry's The Giver and talk about the difference between influence and borrowing.
I absolutely love this premise. I was constantly amused and impressed how Oliver took the symptoms of love and twisted them and made love sound like such a plausible disease. But really, despite the focus on love, one thing that's important to note is that the cure doesn't just suppress love. It suppresses all extreme emotion. So if you have no love, you have no hate. You have no passion, which can lead to both good and bad things. I've seen reviews asking the valid question about how screwed up the kids must be if they're raised without love, but it's important to note they're also raised without hate.
Don't get me wrong: this book isn't without flaws, but the flaws are the kind I like chew on.
Yes, there is a relationship to The Giver, because in this society, society pairs you with a mate. That's the sole premise of Matched, but just a side note in The Giver. Yes, certain kinds of music, art and literature are suppressed in Delirium, but that's not because the government fears an uprising (though I'm sure that's an issue), but also because they fear the emotions that the art either talks about or ignites inside the viewer/listener/reader. Let's face it: art is a by-product of emotion, so it makes sense that art of all kinds would be heavily controlled, so that emotion doesn't become a drug.
Yeah, there's a bit in The Giver about how everyone doesn't feel, how they're emotionally dead, and only the main character really understands what's going on. Yet I found that for all those instances that made me go The Giver, I also found nods to George Orwell's 1984 and more notably, Scott Westerfeld's Uglies.
In my mind, there's no doubt that Oliver was influenced by these previous literary influences: George Orwell, Lois Lowry, and Scott Westerfeld. You can see nods to all of them while reading, and it feels right, like Oliver is paying tribute to those who came before her while also focusing her dystopia on a specific problem that's different from what Orwell, Lowry, and Westerfeld were exploring. Some readers might wish Oliver had done a little more to make her dystopia unique, but I don't mind the nods. I didn't feel like there was too much borrowing, like I did when I was able to compare The Giver to Matched. The similarities between those books, while they are very different, is enough that the author probably doesn't want to admit she's read Lowry, because then any claim of originality immediately becomes moot.
To me, that's the difference between influence and borrowing. One, you're happy to admit to. The other, not so much.
I do wish Oliver had gone further in her dystopian world, though, because I love this idea of love as a disease. Reviews talk about the Cure basically being a lobotomy, but I didn't read it that way. Maybe it's because I'm demented or because I'm an emotionless Vulcan or whatever, but the idea of scientifically poking around in the brain to change things fascinates me (as evidenced by my own SF thesis novel). I just wish, and maybe this is something I should do now that I've been influenced by Lauren Oliver, I wish she'd gone further and gotten rid of sex. Sure, the idea of sex without love inside a marriage should make you shudder, but people have sex without love and/or passion all the time, and why not get rid of it so that sexual stimulation doesn't possibly negate the Cure? But that's what I would've done.
The examinations were a little odd. There's mention that Lena has to wear a super opaque hospital gown, sheer enough to see though (that's how I read it, anyway), and she has to remove her bra, but not her underwear. That's odd, and embarrassing, and uncomfortable. Also, why weren't evaluations rescheduled ASAP, instead of so many weeks later? That didn't seem to jive with how rigid this society is.
There's also a startling mention to homosexuality in Chapter Five that made me feel a wee bit odd, but given the context of society, I suppose I can see why it's considered unnatural (though that's ironic: removing emotions scientifically isn't natural, you know?), but it still startled me. It'd be cool if, later in the trilogy, Lena met some same-sex couples and learned that was completely fine.
I did, however, really like how the Bible has been twisted to fit this new version of society. I think that appealed to me because various translations of the Bible interest me because often what people quote are mistranslated from the original languages, so what some people hold as Biblical truth isn't true at all. So to see further twisting of this text made me gleeful, which might be mean, but I'm glad to see that humanity is still twisting a holy book to keep society in line with whatever current ideals society holds.
There are valid complaints about wondering how society got to be this way, why people were suddenly convinced love was such a bad and deadly thing that they lined up outside of hospitals to get the Cure. It's a valid question, but not one that really bugged me. I was happy to let it slide. I saw someone mention that dystopias should be a product of their current time, that they should take the fears of today and AMPLIFY them into a plausible future so that readers could really fear that future is right around the corner.
I'm not sure I agree with this assessment of dystopias. Because dystopias are a form of science fiction, and science fiction isn't meant to predict the future; nor does it really have to provide a plausible future. I mean, hell, does anyone thing we're going to be traveling through space faster-than-light and making friends with aliens from other planets? Why should dystopias be held to the same predictive standards, or why should dystopias have to reflect an illness in current society? After all, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are thought-experiments, and to me, that's the pinnacle of SF. To ask a question and answer that question through SF: what would a society look like without love? That was Oliver's question, and this book/trilogy is her answer. Just because it's a dystopia doesn't mean this is a foreseeable future, nor that Oliver expects us to fear such a thing. I see such dystopias as a kind of "aren't you glad you don't live THERE" sort of thing, something to make you glad for your current society.
I don't always feel this way about dystopias, mind you. Sometimes, it pisses me off when I can't see how we got from A (now) to B (the dystopia). It depends on the writing, the premise, and so much. And honestly, off the top of my head I can't remember which dystopias ticked me off for leaving out what I felt to be a necessary explanation about the transition, but this is not one of those cases. I think it's because I'm immediately in love with the premise and willing to roll with it, and also, because Oliver's prose is easy on the eyes and reads quite smoothly. No, it's not perfect, but it's still enjoyable.
I did have trouble with Lena at times. While I understood her fears and her need for normalcy, sometimes she made dumb decisions, like going out on a raid night to tell Hana about the raiders. Dumb, dumb, dumb, but Oliver insists on us seeing it as brave. Well, there's a fine line between brave and stupid, and if Alex hadn't been there to rescue her (boo for damsel in distress syndrome), Lena would've been in a world of hurt.
And I did question our setting. For starters, I couldn't see it very well, which means Oliver could've done a better job giving her setting some life. But also, I wondered is this the only place in the US that's done this, and the citizens have been brainwashed into believe it's like this all over the world? Is it like this all over the US? I suspect that we'll learn a lot more about this later in the trilogy, so I'm not going to bitch about moan about the plausibility of it all until I see the bigger picture. If Oliver reveals the bigger picture, which I hope she does.
My Rating: Worth Reading, with Reservations
Reservation: if you're having dystopia burn-out, it's probably best to save this for later, because the influences are of Orwell, Lowry, and Westerfeld are obvious, and while it's a completely different story, the similarities to Matched might be too close for comfort (please note these books were published about the same time, and I personally think Delirium is more engaging than Matched); also, this isn't a fast-paced book, it's a lazy, slow summer read and enjoyable for it, but that's not everyone's cup of tea.
I enjoyed myself, surprisingly. I've been rather apathetic about YA lately, and I'm getting harder and harder to please. This was enjoyable because I bought into the premise so completely and thoroughly. I wish Oliver had gone further, but what I envision is beyond anything Oliver wanted to do, so maybe I should just go write my own science fiction novel. At any rate, the romance here is sweet and there IS NO TRIANGLE (though it's a trilogy, so there's time for one), and I found myself really invested in Lena simply because of her past and how her mother's history relates to Lena's current actions. It's an enjoyable book, and I'm tempted to get the sequel.
Cover Commentary: I never cared for the original cover, which is probably one of the main reasons I never picked this up, despite being interested in the premise. Oh, it's a clever cover, especially when you consider the model (Lena) is boxed in by the letters (society). But this new cover for the special edition, the one featured in this review? Gorgeous! Not only could I not get that model out of my head for Lena, but it's so pretty I almost bought the book before I even read the ARC! Yay for the special edition cover!
Next up: Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane