Book 17: Royale With Cheese

(Every time I say the title of my "real" book 17 out loud, I want to append "with cheese" to the end of it. It's Pulp Fiction's fault which annoys me because I don't even like Pulp Fiction.)

I just finished "real" book 17 out of 24 for the year, Battle Royale (with cheese). Originally written in Japanese, this book apparently created a bit of controversy when it was first published. I can see why - it's pretty violent. The story in a nutshell is that a group of 42 junior high school students have been selected to appear in a government program where the students must kill each other off until only one, the winner, remains. While the book primarily follows Shuya, we (lucky readers that we are) get to omnipotently witness each student's death. So yeah, violent.

And honestly, you can tell it was written in another language then translated into English. Sometimes (okay, oftentimes) the phrasing and verbiage was pretty awkward. At one point they talk about the "idiosyncratic salute" of the government (which still throws me for a loop even now). Another section describes the main character, Shuya, and his "double eyelids". While logically I knew they were trying to say the character had a more "Western" eyelid (with the crease between the part of the lid over the eye and the part under the eyebrow) than the typical "Asian" eyelid (no crease), I still giggled for a while thinking of the character having an inner, reptilian-style eyelid under his normal human ones.

At first, I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to slog through the language weirdness to get into the story. But, violent as it was and awkward as it could be, the story sucked me in. I think it's fairly ironic (considering I tend to go for fiction (movies and books) that have happy endings) but I do enjoy dystopia novels. Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid's Tale, We, Shades of Grey, Little Brother (which might not be overly dystopic but I think qualifies as far as the "see how things in our current system could easily go too far" so I will include it)... these are all dystopic novels that will have a place on my bookshelf. It's fairly unlikely for any truly dystopic novel to have a happy ending (Brave New World is a perfect example of this yet still has one of my favorite book endings ever) yet I so greatly enjoy reading them. Irony abounds in my life.

I did get a little numb around page 300 or so (out of almost 500) because we kept seeing the students die and it began to feel a bit repetitious. But right after I had that thought, the ploy kicked back into gear and I was back into the story. Even though I anticipated an unhappy ending starting out (dystopic book, you know), I pretty quickly found myself less confident of the "everyone I like will die" ending I anticipated. Getting more into the book, I got a bit tense about how it was going to end - would Shuya be the winner? would he die for Noriko? would the students band together and kill the program leader? - and stayed that way until I accidentally spoiled myself looking at a related movie on Amazon. Actually, even after that I was unsure of exactly what the ending would be and how the one factor I spoiled myself on would be incorporated. Maybe other people would find the ending easier to anticipate since sometimes I'm not overly savvy about such things but I think it did a good job at being unexpected.

I don't think this will end up being a dytopic novel that will be studied in high school anytime soon (unlike 1984 and Brave New World) - it's more in the category of "dystopic novel without strong social/governmental commentary". But I really enjoyed it and I would recommend it as a read to others... as long as they are cool with things like double eyelids.