Social critique in literature is a difficult line to walk. Be too blunt with the message and it offends the reader and consumes the narrative; be too subtle with the message and risk not having it heard at all. Unfortunately for Mr. Thomson, he sides with the jackhammer, repeatedly bludgeoning the reader about the head with his clumsy metaphor for social engineering and racial segregation.
In a dystopian England of the near future, the government of the day has responded to mounting social unrest by re-apportioning the realm into four major divisions, red, yellow, green, and blue. Each division corresponds with one of the four Hippocratic humors: melancholic, sanguine, choleric, and phlegmatic. Believing that each human being has a dominant humor, the government forces each English citizen to take a test which predicts their humor, or disposition. The results of the test cause the citizen in question to be relocated to one of the four English zones where only members of their dominant humor live. Through this system of segregation, the government hopes to eliminate conflict from society. After all, if everyone in a given zone has roughly the same disposition, harmony within a given zone will be achieved. And if these zones are only allowed to interact on the most peripheral levels, then societal harmony will follow. This redistribution tears families apart and permanently re-orders society into something new, something no one has experience with, least of all poor Thomas Parry, our protagonist, who is ripped from his mother, sent to a school for testing, and then ordered into the Sanguine zone where he grows up to become a government official. Attending a diplomatic function at which all members from all four humors are present, Parry has a hallucinatory experience at a club in town, an experience which inspires him to break the law by sneaking into each of the four zones and experiencing, for himself, what life is really like in places from which only propaganda now flows.
I shouldn't be so critical of Mr. Thomson's work; after all, he is, in his heavy-handed way, attempting to say something. That's a lot more than can be said of most fiction which seeks only to entertain without edifying. But the attempt is just so patently graceless and ridiculous that I could not suspend my disbelief. A re-structuring of society on this scale would do enormous economic harm to a country. That would not solve social unrest; it would exacerbate it. The notion that a country with, what, 150,000 soldiers, could succeed in ripping the children from the arms of 20,000,000 parents defies logic. Mr. Thomson is right to point out that some governments have foolishly championed flawed notions before. Social Darwinism anyone? But at least those ideas were based on logical prejudice. This just seems to be an excuse for a particularly elaborate acid trip. Just not good enough. (2/5 Stars)
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