It's gotta be hard to come up with something really new to say in a dystopian novel. I mean, you have the All-Powerful State, presiding over a homogeneous, controlled, and more-or-less happy populace (even if their happiness is artificially induced), and along comes some young whippersnapper who wants to do, or be, or have something The Powers That Be don't want him/her to do, be, or have. And he goes off and finds a bunch of other malcontents and they overthrow TPTB and the ones who survive live happily ever after. Or fail and get hauled off to some nihilistic fate worth than death.
Ira Levin does find something new to say by the end of This Perfect Day, but it's a long haul, and only the last quarter of the book really starts looking at new ideas â among them that humanity in general is selfish, short-sighted, arrogant, combative, and possibly not worth the effort it would take to redeem it. Each reader is going to have to decide whether the ending is happy or not.
Meanwhile, there's all that prep stuff to grind through, as we are introduced to Chip (we can tell he's going to be the protagonist because he rejects the officially-sanctioned ânameberâ assigned to him at birth) and follow him through his occasional youthful questioning of âwhyâ â aided and abetted by a grandfather who's also somewhat of a rebel at heart. Then puberty rears its priapic head (so to speak), and things get sidetracked for a couple hundred pages as we are invited to consider a culture that allows pretty much everybody to sleep with everybody else (though one would have to look pretty deeply and make some inferences to find anything but hetero-cis relationships here). Sleeping with is okay â even encouraged (but only on Saturdays) â though marriage and the right to procreate are, like virtually everything else, controlled by Uni â the life-giving/controlling computer system that runs the âfamilyâ. And, predictably, Chip is found by a small underground group vaguely interested in talking about destroying Uni, but really more interested in accessing forbidden substances like tobacco, perfume, and alcohol.
The long middle section deals mainly with Chip's experiences in this group, and Levin doesn't hesitate to pull the rug out from under the reader with great vigor and regularity until finally, after much wavering and recidivism, it looks like Chip is actually going to develop and carry out a workable revolt.
The weakest part of the novel, and perhaps the component which has aged most poorly since 1960, is the way in which the female characters are portrayed. Particularly Lilac, the girl with whom Chip becomes obsessed and subsequently kidnaps and rapes, seems to consider herself unfairly victimized for, oh, maybe five or six hours, and then everything is hunky-dory and they become a devoted couple, risking all kinds of peril to stay together. Even for emotionally-stunted automatons, this feels a bit unlikely, and in fact seems to be one of those âshe loves him because the author says she does, and besides, he needed that relationship for the rest of the plot to workâ gimmicks.
This is not always an easy read, and while it does take a look at the very real kinds of human failings that could realistically lie at the bottom of a dystopian society, it's dated in many ways and leaves a Chinese banquet's worth of plot noodles dangling.
Ira Levin does find something new to say by the end of This Perfect Day, but it's a long haul, and only the last quarter of the book really starts looking at new ideas â among them that humanity in general is selfish, short-sighted, arrogant, combative, and possibly not worth the effort it would take to redeem it. Each reader is going to have to decide whether the ending is happy or not.
Meanwhile, there's all that prep stuff to grind through, as we are introduced to Chip (we can tell he's going to be the protagonist because he rejects the officially-sanctioned ânameberâ assigned to him at birth) and follow him through his occasional youthful questioning of âwhyâ â aided and abetted by a grandfather who's also somewhat of a rebel at heart. Then puberty rears its priapic head (so to speak), and things get sidetracked for a couple hundred pages as we are invited to consider a culture that allows pretty much everybody to sleep with everybody else (though one would have to look pretty deeply and make some inferences to find anything but hetero-cis relationships here). Sleeping with is okay â even encouraged (but only on Saturdays) â though marriage and the right to procreate are, like virtually everything else, controlled by Uni â the life-giving/controlling computer system that runs the âfamilyâ. And, predictably, Chip is found by a small underground group vaguely interested in talking about destroying Uni, but really more interested in accessing forbidden substances like tobacco, perfume, and alcohol.
The long middle section deals mainly with Chip's experiences in this group, and Levin doesn't hesitate to pull the rug out from under the reader with great vigor and regularity until finally, after much wavering and recidivism, it looks like Chip is actually going to develop and carry out a workable revolt.
The weakest part of the novel, and perhaps the component which has aged most poorly since 1960, is the way in which the female characters are portrayed. Particularly Lilac, the girl with whom Chip becomes obsessed and subsequently kidnaps and rapes, seems to consider herself unfairly victimized for, oh, maybe five or six hours, and then everything is hunky-dory and they become a devoted couple, risking all kinds of peril to stay together. Even for emotionally-stunted automatons, this feels a bit unlikely, and in fact seems to be one of those âshe loves him because the author says she does, and besides, he needed that relationship for the rest of the plot to workâ gimmicks.
This is not always an easy read, and while it does take a look at the very real kinds of human failings that could realistically lie at the bottom of a dystopian society, it's dated in many ways and leaves a Chinese banquet's worth of plot noodles dangling.
