The Divers' Game
A Novel
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2.8 • 10 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
From the inimitable mind of award-winning author Jesse Ball, a novel about an unsettlingly familiar society that has renounced the concept of equality—and the devastating consequences of unmitigated power
The old-fashioned struggle for fairness has finally been abandoned. It was a misguided endeavor. The world is divided into two groups, pats and quads. The pats may kill the quads as they like, and do. The quads have no recourse but to continue with their lives.
The Divers’ Game is a thinly veiled description of our society, an extreme case that demonstrates a truth: we must change or our world will collapse.
What is the effect of constant fear on a life, or on a culture? The Divers’ Game explores the consequences of violence through two festivals, and through the dramatic and excruciating examination of a woman’s final moments.
Brilliantly constructed and achingly tender, The Divers’ Game shatters the notion of common decency as the binding agent between individuals, forcing us to consider whether compassion is intrinsic to the human experience. With his signature empathy and ingenuity, Jesse Ball’s latest work solidifies his reputation as one of contemporary fiction’s most mesmerizing talents.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his atmospheric, occasionally mesmerizing tale of haves and have-nots, Ball (Census) delivers a strident condemnation of inequality in an imagined nation. In the stilted exposition, a schoolteacher lectures his students about "the circumstances that led to the transformation of our society." Facing an influx of refugees, the society's leaders brand them, confine them to specified "quadrants," and arm their privileged citizens with gases with which to incapacitate, confuse, sicken, or kill the new underclass (or "quads"). The measures are executed with a sense of "vibrant morality," as the enforcers are secure in their conviction that "things done to those beneath are not properly violence." The novel comprises a series of vignettes: a teacher brings one of his students to a moribund zoo whose creatures are all dead; a quad girl prepares for her ceremonial role as the queen of a carnivalesque procession; a group of children play the dangerous "divers' game," in which they swim through a treacherous underwater channel connecting two ponds; a woman plans to kill herself to atone for her complicity in the society's brutal persecutions. Some episodes are gripping, while others are marred by philosophizing ("Do the places we inhabit confine us by their very nature?"). Still, the novel's depiction of life in this dystopian world is eerie and suffused with symbolic weight.
