Stereotypes and tokens. [The Trials of Koli by M.R. Carey]
The journey through M. R. Carey's "immersive, impeccably rendered world" (Kirkus) -- a world in which nature has turned against us -- continues in The Trials of Koli, book two of the Rampart Trilogy.
The earth wants to swallow us whole...
Koli never planned to set foot outside his small village. He knew that beyond its walls lay a fearsome landscape filled with choker trees, vicious beasts and Shunned men. But when he was exiled, he had no choice but to journey out into this strange world where every moment is a fight for survival.
And it's not just Koli's life that is threatened. Whole villages just like his are dying out. But Koli heard a story, once. A story about lost London, and the mysterious tech of the Old Times that may still be there. If he can find it, there may still be a way for him to change his own fate - by saving the lives of those who are left.
The Rampart Trilogy The Book of Koli // The Trials of Koli // The Fall of Koli For more from M. R. Carey, check out: The Girl With All the Gifts // Fellside // The Boy on the Bridge // Someone Like Me By the same author, writing as Mike Carey: The Devil You Know // Vicious Circle // Dead Men's Boots // Thicker Than Water // The Naming of the Beasts
The second book in his Rampart Trilogy, M.R. Carey's The Trials of Koli takes us back to our post-ecological collapse dystopia, our adventure picking right up from where we left off in The Book of Koli. When I read the first book there were some things I couldn't entirely name that irked me about our protagonist, would you guess it, Koli. A new point of view, Spinner's, alternates in giving us a balanced context for their shared history and it becomes super-evident how self-centered, in that most typical of a teenage male, Koli really is? Was? His goals, his treatment of his would-be love interest as a lofty goal to have, his confidence that his feelings were reciprocated, or that they key decision she'd made might overturned if he'd been different. His overall naivete! I could go on, but I won't. Because it wasn't Koli that annoyed me the most this book, it's the writing of female-voiced characters.
What I liked initially about The Book of Koli was that diverse representation was there but it wasn't the defining feature of a character. By the end of that first book I was proven wrong. We start off with some trans representation and an overview of their struggles fitting into their respective society. Probably until the last half or even the last third of the last third of the book we had one trans character. Suddenly we get a second one, who apparently will be part of the main gang moving forward, suddenly, and who gets more character development than our other established trans character. The difference? The former is a trans male and the latter, Cup, is a trans female. Between the first and second books, really considering the spectrum of female characters, near all the female-voiced characters, generally save Cup and the artificial intelligence, Monono, are characterized as a mix of unfeeling, scheming, calculating, cold-hearted, distant shrews whose lives and actions are justified in the framework of their role in their dystopia. Koli is played as if to only act on his emotions, out of the kindness and goodness of his heart. We should know, he's in the right.
Logical human actions are played as those of an unfeeling woman, to be reproached by our male lead and his AI companion. Or steps to avoid anarchy are evil, power-hungry schemes to be reproached by a willful and easily-manipulated son. But it boils down to one question. What besides their female identity, their role as a female in their society, save for the AI character, drives the female characters? The leaders in the story are authority figures, sure, but they are more often than not depicted hierarchically with a mutual disdain or animosity linking them. Female-female friendships, if any, are only seen when there's a clear hierarchy, a whole other female characters interacting trope.
Why do I bring up the trans characters separately first? Because they are tokens. The most visible token diversity hires in the book (I could speak on Koli as a token, but that'd take too long). The imbalanced characterization for our trans male character with respect to the heaps we get for the trans female character kind of highlights the whole point. More often than not, trans females and not trans males are the default trans representative. As such the sum of who they are revolves around their gender identity. The same was true here for the cis female characters. Mother, wife, daughter, matriarch, girlfriend, or motherly, daughterly - and all the adjectives one attributes to those traits - no female character was portrayed without one of those characteristics being more than central to their character.
So, long story short, the female characters were annoying and the way their interactions were written even more so. It was just weird to me that our motivation is to address humanity's reproduction issues, and yet despite talking about our trans characters being forced unwillingly into marriages, there's no real discussion about the reproductive aspect. When one character suggests to another starting hormonal therapy for Cup and the other brings up the long-term risks (notably potential subsequent withdrawal and the emotional distress that might cause), it was weirdly brushed aside despite it being a very real possibility. Wouldn't it have made more sense in this death by seed dystopia to see more barriers in that sense to hormone therapy? If gene editing is a thing, there's no way to genetically dampen endogenous hormone production? Synthetic hormones were the answer? The whole thing felt like it was a thing to try and make a point. Even the eco-monsters are very generally touched upon, so far, without in-depth discussion of mechanisms and world mechanics. The flora and fauna were edited for their survival because humanity was destroying them, but now we must destroy them? There are good amount of things I'd like to see seriously addressed in the third book of the trilogy, The Fall of Koli, but I'm feeling like they might get rush thrown at me.
At this point I'm way too invested in this story to not want to continue, but instead of pushing the main story of finding out what happened to humanity, Koli's story, much further along we spent more time world-building and expanding on what, at least for the moment, seems to be a secondary storyline. Though I'm sure it'll come back and be a crucial piece of the puzzle. I gave The Book of Koli 4 stars and I'm giving The Trials of Koli 3 stars. And that average of 3.5 stars is feeling about right so far.
The Trials of Koli was published September 2020.
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