I loved [book:Census|35068746], and was excited when I found this on Hoopla.

I loved Ball's worldbuilding. Here we have 3 connected short stories that illustrate a a dystopian city. The Pats are the favored free, they live in perceived safety. The quads ate descendants of immigrants and prisoners, the unwelcome and excluded. They live in their own lawless neighborhoods--they are marked so as to always be noticeable. The Pats are afraid of the Quads, and can do anything to them with impunity. Anything goes in Quad communities--there are no police to protect them, the guards can also kill them at will.

We get perspectives from 3 women--a teen Pat, a child Quad, and an adult Pat. The worldbuilding is fascinating, but the novel is really about fear, trust, and naivete.

This was almost 5 stars for me, but each story ends just a little too soon for me. The reader is left to guess the endings, which is never my favorite. I am more interested in the author's choices! ( )

The Divers Game
by Jesse Ball
2019
ECCO/ Harper Collins
4.5 / 5.0

What a great story! Its short, written with precision and thought-provoking. A stimulating quick read. 'The Divers Game' deals with violence, how it effects society and how we are traumatized by the threat of violence against those considered as different, or other.

In this dystopian novel, the world is divided into two very different groups. The Pats and the Quads. The Pats have supreme power, can kill or harass Quads any time for any thing, and the police do no intervene. It is considered acceptable. It becomes obvious that this is a story of Xenophobia, and the issue is immigration. Pats are from the area. Quads are not. Pats believe they can decide which Quads can stay, and which they will kill or allow to leave. If a Quad steps our of line, they kill the Quad.

This is a very insightful and deep book. I enjoyed reading it and how it presents the issue of xenophobia. ( )

Ball’s latest novel is a very odd story with no discernible plot. He leaves so many of the details of his futuristic world for readers to glean from contextual clues, which gets old rather quickly. I am still not certain what point he is trying to make here. There is the obvious aspect of a world divided into a very clear us versus them, haves versus have-nots, immigrants versus those who were citizens before an unspecified date, but that is too obvious for Ball. The whole thing is very chaotic and unsettled, with one-third of the story completely deviating from the rest of it. This is definitely not as fluid as his previous novel, which I enjoyed. I did not enjoy this one.

The Diver’s Game is a painful book to read in Trump’s America. It is set in a society that has embraced inequality, not only of outcomes but of opportunities. Ball imagines a society that feels beset by refugees. They decide to let them in if they can tell them apart from the citizens or pats. So they brand them with a red hat on their faces. Then they cut off their thumbs. Then they decide they have no standing in law so any action against them, even killing them, is not violence. Then they segregate them in “quads” from which they get their name.

This is a novel told in stories with simple, declarative prose that gives it the sensibility of a folk tale. This makes it feel immediate. It has an emotional power that would be lost with more explication.

There is the fantastical absurdism of it all. We want to deny this possibility. The first story is about Lois and Lethe, two schoolgirls in a class where the teacher is lecturing on the principles of their society. He invites them to the zoo, something unimaginable to them. There the true horror of this world begins to be suspected. The title story is about dangerous game children play to show their courage. There is a story about a ritual called the Infanta that gets more horrifying by the second. The final story takes us full circle, back to that professor and his wife, who writes him a letter after coming to understand what kind of world they live in.

The Diver’s Game sounds so extreme, doesn’t it? But then Brian Kilmeade defending separating children, even infants, from their parents and locking them in cages by saying, “Like it or not, these aren’t our kids. Show them compassion, but it’s not like he’s doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country.” That really not that different. The pats said they were showing the quads compassion, too.

This is a horrifying book but that is because it builds on where we are now and fully draws out what the final implications of our xenophobia are. Ball asked what might we do, but perhaps given out history the real question is what won’t we do?

The Diver’s Game will be released on September 10th. I received an e-galley from the publisher through NetGalley.

The Diver’s Game at Harper Collins
Jesse Ball author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/08/28/9780062676108/ ( )

A Snake, A Rope, A Wall or a Tree?
Four Ways of Looking at a Dystopia*
Review of an Advance Reading Copy of the Ecco books hardcover edition expected September 10, 2019.

What came to mind while reading The Divers' Game was the old Hindu parable of an elephant being examined by blind men. Each of them has their own unique "view" of the object which is being examined and that view is dependent on which portion of the animal they are touching. The one holding the trunk thinks it is a snake, the one holding the tail thinks it is a rope, the side of the animal is a wall, the leg is a tree trunk, etc.

So it is with The Divers' Game, where we are given 4 different views of a dystopia in 4 short stories that have a small degree of character crossover.

Review in Progress

Trivia and Links
*Yes, I stole the subtitle idea from Umberto Eco's "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" ( )