 Boys and girls are unaware of each other’s existence in uninspiring thriller Josh Malerman set the horror world alight back in 2015 with his dazzling debut Birdbox and followed that sleeper hit with a string of highly original releases; novels, novellas and short stories. However, his latest offering Inspection is a misfire, lacking the originality, frights, pacing and most importantly, the plot to drive a near 400-page novel. The main concept (the only one if I’m brutally honest) behind the story would be better suited in a Young Adult (YA) release as it concerns the separation of boys from girls. The subjugation of kids in YA dystopian fiction, and how they rail back against the system, has been the number one theme since Katniss Everdeen fired her first arrow. Let’s be absolutely clear, there is no Katniss in this dull and repetitive novel. Part one focuses on the ‘Alphabet Boys’, 26 young males who are being trained in a school hidden in a remote forest. They are part of an experiment which is supposed to create (or breed) child geniuses, those behind the project believe that if boys are kept in total isolation from girls, ultimately, they will perform better academically, much better. However, this thought experiment takes everything a stage further and the boys do not even know girls, or the female sex, exist at all. They have been told that they were plucked from trees which grow in the local forest, not knowing any better, they believe this tale which has been reinforced since birth. The 26 boys (24 actually, two are dead) do not have proper names and are known as A-Z and the novel is seen mainly from the point of view of a boy called J, who quietly begins to question what is going on around him. All the boys are the same age and are approaching puberty, which is obviously a key stage of their physical and mental development. The first problem with Inspection was the fact that these children were fairly one-dimensional and Malerman fails to convince in creating authentic child voices. Some of the interactions amongst each other in this weird environment, especially when J begins to ask questions, were interesting enough but everything moved at the pace of a slug. It was also limited by their non-existent life-experiences, which made them come across as rather flat. The author failed entirely in creating kids I cared about. One can make comparisons with Sarah Pinsborough’s modern YA classic The Death House in which teenagers are sent to an island prison to die when they are diagnosed with a virus. Several years after I read that book I still remember the central character was named Toby and in comparison the lettered characters in Inspection are already drifting from memory. Pinborough’s children had personalities, fears and shed real tears whilst J and his friends simply merged into one ‘boy’. Part one ‘Alphabet Boys’ and part two ‘Needs’ plod along for a stodgy 200 pages and we are simultaneously introduced to the adults who run the experiment. They were as tedious as cardboard cut-outs with very limited backstories and once their limited pasts are slowly revealed any existing tension in the novel disappears as they have very little to say and their motivations go unexplored. There is not any big secret, reveal, revelation or anything else, and you’ll begin to wonder about the point of it all? The book has the subtlety of a sledgehammer; if children misbehave there is the threat of the ‘Corner’, or the kids are scared of ‘being spoilt rotten’ by imaginary diseases, with the guy in charge is known as D.A.D and seen as the father to all the boys. The only thing I found faintly amusing was the idea that one man was writing a whole library of new literature which only these 26 boys would read! Books written without the notion of women or girls… My heart sank at around 200 pages and I almost quit the book. This is in the blurb, so it’s not a spoiler, part ‘K’ is about an identical school but with girls. For the next 100 pages, or more, Malerman repeats the same sort of thing from the previous two parts, but this time with girls. This was both boring and repetitive, and this time we have M.O.M instead of D.A.D, but a similar punishment system. The plot development was particularly obvious; of course, the boys and girls were going to meet. One wonders why M.O.M and D.A.D whose main purpose was to keep two sets of children isolated from each other would actually place them in the same forest? Very stupid or perhaps I missed something as my attention was fading fast. When the kids finally meet it got even more ridiculous. Remember, these are children NOT teenagers. Within five minutes they start kissing and fooling around. It was just stupid and stretched credibility way beyond anything I might swallow and heads towards an underwhelming ending. The way the kissing sequence was handled was completely botched and it raises questions about sexuality in the rest of the novel. There is no evidence of pre-teen angst or sexuality issues, there seem to be no gay kids, no masturbation or any kind of experimentation which might occur when kids are living together when the lights go out. Maybe I missed something, but completely ignoring the possibility of homosexuality was a major weakness. Earlier this year Ginger Nuts of Horror did a huge feature month long feature on diversity in horror, considering this is a novel with gender as a major theme, where is the diversity? Whether you regard Inspection as dystopian fiction or not you have to believe in the world which the author has created and in this respect this novel fails to convince. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale the way the sex act is carried out is both horrific and implausible, but in the world she has created everything has a purpose and the rules of the Republic of Gilead are very believable within the creation. This book fails in every way which makes the Atwood novel so stunning, nothing genuinely gels together and the twee idea of kids being threatened to be sent to the ‘Corner’ was particularly uninspiring. Considering Malerman gave us such a vividly created post-apocalyptic world in Birdbox, and a wonderful recreation of the 1950s in Mad Black Wheel I’m surprised that the turreted schools of Inspection turned out to be so drab. Inspection has been picking up favourable reviews elsewhere, however, I shake my head at unwise comparisons with the likes of The Handmaid’s Tale and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Those novels are modern masterpieces whose reputations have only strengthened over time, on the other hand, this novel with the tired, clunky and outdated gender-based plot, will have nowhere to go. 1/5 Tony Jones INSPECTION BY JOSH MALERMAN Boys are being trained at one school for geniuses, girls at another. Neither knows the other exists--until now. The New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box invites you into a world of secrets and chills in a coming-of-age story like no other.One of Elle's "Best Books to Read in Spring 2019" - "Josh Malerman is a master at unsettling you--and keeping you off-balance until the last page is turned."--Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author of Blackbirds J is a student at a school deep in a forest far away from the rest of the world. J is one of only twenty-six students, all of whom think of the school's enigmatic founder as their father. J's peers are the only family he has ever had. The students are being trained to be prodigies of art, science, and athletics, and their life at the school is all they know--and all they are allowed to know. But J suspects that there is something out there, beyond the pines, that the founder does not want him to see, and he's beginning to ask questions. What is the real purpose of this place? Why can the students never leave? And what secrets is their father hiding from them? Meanwhile, on the other side of the forest, in a school very much like J's, a girl named K is asking the same questions. J has never seen a girl, and K has never seen a boy. As K and J work to investigate the secrets of their two strange schools, they come to discover something even more mysterious: each other.   Comments are closed.
|
Archives
May 2023
|
RSS Feed
|
|