sawyl | Entries tagged with james dashner

Finishing up with James Dashner's The Death Cure, the last in his Maze Runner series. I'm not sure it quite sticks the dismount but it was diverting enough.

Having survived a testing maze and made their way through the scorch and a city full of people infected with a mind-altering plague, Thomas and his friends have finally made it to the headquarters of WICKED, the organisation dedicated to finding a cure for the disease. But when Thomas learns that his pre-maze memories are going to be restored, he rebels, deciding that he doesn't want to go back to being the fanatic he was before his early memories were erased.

Under murky circumstances, Thomas, Newt and Minho, the three original Gladers, along with Jorge and Brenda, two people they met in the Scorch city, escape and flee to Denver. Here they find a city in turmoil, where the infected are officially held outside the city in a place called the Crank Palace, but where, in reality, the barriers are starting to fail, with more and more near-zombies wandering around the place. Attempting to find help, the group learn of the Right Arm, an organisation who have decided that WICKED are never going to be able to create their much-heralded cure for the Flare and that the world would be better off trying to improve things for the infected and those yet to be infected.

The book does a good job of conjuring the fearful world of the uninfected, with live in Denver portrayed as tenuous and uncertain, where almost everyone is living with the potential death sentence of the Flare, a disease that everyone gets eventually and which kills almost everyone it infects in the nastiest way possible. The flow of action feels a bit less successful — the way events unfold feel a little arbitrary — some of characters don't really work — I've spent the entire trilogy waiting for Theresa to snap into focus but it never really happens — and it relies too heavily on Thomas' gut feelings, all of which turn out to be correct. Still, I'm not really the target audience, so your milage may vary...

Onward to James Dashner's The Scorch Trials where things finally start to make a little more sense for the reader, if not the group of kids who escaped to freedom at the end of The Maze Runner.

After making it out and apparently being wrested away from WICKED, the group in charge of the maze experiment, the boys find themselves put in a safehouse and fed with pizza. Theresa, the only girl in the group, is split out and put in her own room. During the night she vanishes, as do all the adults, and a new boy called Aris appears in her room. Aris drops the bombshell that he too was in a maze, but his group was reversed: all girls, he was the only boy, and his arrival triggered the end of the experiment. As Aris explains, someone notices a tattoo on his neck, identifying him as a member of the B-group. Then, much to their surprise, the rest of the boys discover they too have been marked as members of the A-group. Some of the boys also find they've been tagged with a role: Minho is the leader; Newt is the glue; and Thomas, well he's the boy who is going to be killed by the B-group.

At this point a stranger appears sitting at desk behind a forcefield. He tells the Gladers that they have contracted the Flare, a deadly disease that sends people mad, and that they have two weeks to make it through a scorched wasteland to a safe location in the mountains where they will be cured. Not seeing any alternative, the group follow the man's instructions only to find that their route takes them through a city infested with Cranks — people infected with the Flare — some of whom are so Gone they've been reduced to crazed monsters.

Along the way Thomas spends a great deal of time struggling with his relationship with Teresa. Unable to communicate with her for most of the time, she occasionally gets through with the odd ludic telepathic message, usually telling him that something horrible is about to happen and he needs to trust her. All of this leaves the poor boy more than a little mixed up, as do his uncertain feelings for Brenda, a newly-infected girl who helps him escape the Cranks' city.

As the action unfolds, it becomes clear that the boys' notion that the Trials are intended as some sort of Darwinian selection are increasingly wide of the mark, given the random nature of some attacks. Rather, all the overheard talk of Variables from the WICKED administrators suggests that they are trying to induce specific experiences in the minds of the subjects, presumable as part of their on-going attempts to cure the Flare.

The Scorch Trials is an easy read — and a good deal shorter than Justin Cronin's The Passage! — and does a good job of setting up a post-epidemic apocalypse world, albeit one where those involved can never be sure what is real and what is a test.

For no terribly good, other than a desire for a short slab of distopian fiction, reason I decided to read James Dashner's The Maze Runner. Despite entertained by it, I wasn't entirely convinced but then I'm not exactly in the book's core audience.

The story begins when Thomas rises up through a lift to find himself in the Glade, a homestead and farm populated by a group of teenage boys, all of whom have no personal memories of their life before. The Glade lies at the heart of a maze filled with monsters called Grievers who appear most often at night. Every day, a group of runners travel through the maze mapping the moving walls and searching for an exit. At sundown, they return to the Glade where the walls that surround it close, better to keep the monsters out.

The first part of the book sets up the small world of the Glade and the Maze and its inhabitants. Like a more organised Lord of the Flies, they hold to a rigid set of rules to keep them from slipping into anarchy, and, unlike the island, they receive regular weekly deliveries of supplies and, monthly, a new boy is sent up in the lift. The group share a common slang and an annoying habit of responding to Thomas' questions by telling him that he's too new to know the answer — an unsatisfactory device that seems only to kick the narrative can further down the road in order to keep the reader in the dark for as long as possible.

Despite having no memories, the Glade seems familiar to Thomas and he feels sure he is destined to be a runner. Sure enough, thanks to an act of rule-breaking bravery, he jumps the queue of potential candidates and finds himself the newest runner on the team, where his innovative thinking leads to a breakthrough discover. Then, a couple of days after Thomas' arrival, the lift delivers an unscheduled arrival: a girl in a coma bearing a message that she is the last one ever. The girl's arrival radically changes the settled patterns of the world: the sun stops rising, the walls stop closing, and the Grievers go crazy, killing one of the Glade's inhabitants every night. It is clear that the group must now solve the maze or die.

For all my complaints about the narrative devices, the story pushes along at a rapid pace and the characters are sufficiently distinct to make an impact. The world is intriguing — although as books with mazes go, it's hardly a particularly deadly example of the species — and there are hints that the abilities of the Creators are closer to magic than science; the boys' world could just as easily be an immersive simulation as a real maze.

Ultimately though, it was unteresting enough and short enough and undemanding enough that I'm probably going to read the sequels to see where we go from here...

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Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Entries tagged with james dashner

The Death Cure

The Scorch Trials

The Maze Runner

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August 2018

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