Suddenly, it's trendy to be post-apocalyptic. The ragged clothes,
the barren environment, the starvation, the creeping insanity and
stifling fear. Cormac McCarthy"s
The Road is the seminal work of this genre, but it's not a book for middle school kids. Have you read
The Road?
What makes McCarthy's book so remarkable is that the focus isn't
actually on the desolate wasteland of post-apocalyptic America.
Instead, it's the deeply moving story of the father and son making
their way across the land that captures us. The reader shakes with
fear whenever the man and boy encounter a potentially dangerous
stranger. The reader aches with joy when they find a fully stocked
bomb shelter where they spend a few precious days of normalcy. And the
reader cries with pain as the father fights with every bone in his
withering body to protect his little boy. When you finish
The Road, you are devastated by the vision of love and loss that McCarthy presents.
So now, YA authors are capitalizing on the success of McCarthy's work
and creating a YA genre devoted to their own visions of a dystopic
future. James Dashner's The Maze Runner (Delacorte),
sends us into the nightmarish world of The Glade, where teenage boys
whose memories have been erased must survive day to day with little
hope of ever returning to the actual world. Of course, they're not
really sure the actual world is worth returning to, considering The
Creators, the men and women who put them in The Glade and created The
Maze that surrounds it, are out there.
Dashner tries to
focus the story on Thomas, the newest arrival at The Glade. Though he
can't remember anything about his life before being sent to The Glade,
Thomas feels in his bones that he knows something. He also
seems certain that he is meant to be a Runner, one of the chosen few
boys sent out each day into the massive, ever-shifting Maze outside The
Glade's walls.
I liked much about The Maze Runner.
It is certainly original, and the action never lets up. There's plenty
of bloody violence to satisfy a YA reader's need for grisly, gruesome
deaths. And Dashner's descriptions of both The Glade and The Maze are
vivid, dark, and frightening. There are plenty of allusions to The Lord of the Flies,
but with the twist that the boys of The Glade are desperately clinging
to the semblance of order that they've created for themselves.
But ultimately, The Maze Runner
frustrates. Dashner reveals the complexities of the boys' crumbling
world in painfully minute increments. Thomas doesn't know what's going
on, and neither does the reader. It was maddening to read over and over
again that Thomas couldn't put the pieces of this puzzle together, that
the solution to it all was just on the edge of his mind. Also, Dashner
sacrifices character development for his breathless action. Thomas and
the other named boys of The Glade spend a lot of time yelling at one
another and puffing up their chests, but none of them has a distinct
personality that makes him likable or otherwise. Some of these boys
will die, but the reader doesn't really care if it's Alby or Minho or
Frypan, since they don't endear themselves to us in any way.
Wanting to know who had created The Glade and why kept me reading. But here's the thing, The Maze Runner
is the first book in a trilogy (I know, what a shocker). If James
Dashner had been in front of me when I reached the last page, I would
have punched him. The final chapters race along at such a breakneck
pace, revealing so little but introducing so much, I felt that I
understood even less at the end than I did at the beginning. Sure,
I'll read the sequel(s), but more to satisfy my curiosity than to see
how things turn out for Thomas.
But I suppose that's what
Dashner wants. That's what many YA writers seem to want nowadays: To
serve up the first book in a series as a literary amuse bouche, a
taste, a flavorful little bite, but no more than that. I don't know
when this became commonplace for writers, but we are never given a full
meal anymore. No book can stand on its own, its story complete and
satisfying as a prix fixe dinner. I appreciate the publishers' desire
to sell product, but they're not making it fun to be a return customer!
Which brings me back to The Road.
McCarthy's book will be read for generations to come, maybe until we
reach our own apocalypse. Its vision is terrifying, agonizing,
redemptive. And completely gratifying. I cannot say the same for The Maze Runner's intended world to come. At least not what I've seen of it.