Divided Kingdom [Hardcover]

Rupert Thomson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2005

And then the night when my life began again A strange beginning. Soldiers, bright lights. The cold. And me being lifted, as if by surgeons, into a new world It is winter, somewhere in the United Kingdom, and an eight year-old boy is removed from his home in the middle of the night. He soon learns that he is the victim of an extraordinary political experiment. A vision, a fable, a satire, a love story, a ghost story, Divided Kingdom is a remarkable, genre-defying novel and it confirms Rupert Thomson as that rare thing - a writer of sublime prose who also has a mesmerising tale to tell.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Thomson's latest dystopian novel (after The Book of Revelation) begins in brilliant, unsettling fashion when a young boy is taken by government decree from his parents during the initial stages of the Rearrangement, which occurs in a totalitarian, near-future England. In this brave new world, the country's entire population is forcibly reorganized and relocated into autonomous zones according to psychology, or the four humors: choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic and sanguine. Placed in an orphanage, renamed Thomas Parry and transferred to a new family in the Red Quarter (for sanguine types), he settles in with a father overwhelmed by the loss of his relocated wife and a promiscuous sister desperate for human connection. As an adult, Thomas takes a clandestine job with the government, but soon risks being charged with "undermining the state" when he begins a spur-of-the-moment voyage across borders in search, at first, of his real parents and his true self. Despite a cleverly imagined political system and the promise of sharp social criticism, this allegory limps to an ending that belies its inspired start.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

In this dystopian novel, the population of the United Kingdom has been divvied up into color-coded sectors determined by humor: the phlegmatic, the melancholic, the choleric, and the sanguine. Under this system, temperament trumps kinship—in a neat twist, the family unit is now considered responsible for "society's disintegration"—and separation is enforced by border guards and government informers. At first, Thomson's hero, Thomas Parry, seems content, as befits his sanguine designation. A rising star in the Red Quarter bureaucracy, he supervises the expulsion of unsatisfactory citizens to other regions. But when, on a rare visit to another quarter, he is issued a mysterious invitation to a night club, where he seems to return to his pre-division life, his faith in the absolute categorization of personality is shaken. Although Thomson's plotting is distinctly schematic—"Brave New World" is his obvious model—he succeeds in imparting a sense of urgency to his hero's search for identity.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing; First American Edition edition (April 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747572186
• ISBN-13: 978-0747572183
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,435,695 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "They took the worst part of us and built a system out of it and it worked", November 14, 2005

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Divided Kingdom (Hardcover)

In Divided Kingdom society has become troubled and fragmented - obsessed with acquisition and celebrity, it is a place defined by misery, envy, and greed. Crime is rampant; the courts are swamped, the prisons overflowing, the divorce rate following marriage quickly and predictably. Faced with lawlessness and chaos, the current government - hidden in an underground bunker - is forced to make a radical decision.

The Kingdom is to be divided into four countries, this political solution, or "rearrangement" comes with considerable risk, but is seen as the only alternative to avert certain anarchy. Each citizen is psychologically assessed and placed, sometimes with force, into four administrative units, each corresponding to one of the medieval "humours."

There's the Red Quarter, inhabited by the cheerfully sanguine, and where Matthew Micklewright, our main protagonist, then aged eight, lives; the Yellow Quarter, where the choleric rage and beat each other up; the Blue Quarter, populated by the stoically phlegmatic; and the "Green Quarter that harbors melancholic depressives.

Concrete boundaries are thrown up, rigidly controlled by the border police, and each country is sealed, fearful of the threat of psychological contamination. The rearrangement deliberately manufactured to create a climate of suspicion and denial between each country - people burying parts of their personalities that don't fit, and hiding their secrets that could now be judged and condemned.

One night, as the roundup begins, young Matthew is cruelly separated from his parents and taken to an immensely sinister boarding school, where he is lectured on the Rearrangements political rationale. The country had become "a troubled place," an enthusiastic Miss Groves tells the class, and this resolution was seen as the only alternative. Subsequently our hero -now renamed Thomas Parry- is given a new family and groomed for advancement in the Red Quarter regime as a civil servant.

After years of studying and career diligence, Thomas is finally given the senior administrative job he has been aiming for; this involves the ongoing process of psychological testing and relocation of members of the population who fail to meet the demands of his quarter. Now he is able to attend commissions and attend cross-border conferences, a privilege available only to the autocratic elite.

Dispatched to a cross border conference in the Blue Quarter, Thomas clandestinely visits a nightclub, the Bathysphere. Shocking images of his past come back to haunt him, of his mother, and of his first true love. He isn't sure what to make of these memories, all he knows is that he has experienced something so totally profound and addictive that it skews his sanguine nature, setting him on a course of self-discovery as he travels through the divided kingdom's four quarters.

Thomas becomes caught up in a terror attack in the Yellow Quarter; is shipwrecked on the coast of the Blue Quarter, and is farmed off to an angst-ridden Green Quarter boarding house, eventually escaping and joining the itinerant and stateless White People, a band of nomadic outsiders who drift aimlessly from quarter to quarter, spurned and shunned by the populations of this new and unsettling world.

Reticent of Huxley's Brave New World, author Rupert Thomson, rather than focusing on the nuts and bolts, the mechanics of this dystopian world chooses instead, to chart Thomas's tortured emotional landscape, as he becomes an outlaw, a fugitive, traveling from quarter to quarter, experiencing first hand each facet of the human condition. Our hero starts off with such noble pursuits and intent, convinced that his role is safe guarding the values and integrity of the Red Quarter. "I realized that he had to fight for the system, had to believe in it, or my removal from my family will have been for nothing."

But as Thomas travels, and witnesses the Yellow Quarter's inhumanity, the Blue Quarter's innocently sweet nature, and the Green quarter's chronic depressives, he realizes that the divided kingdom is united after all, by just one thing: "longing," a longing by most people to perhaps be reunited again.

But like the Kingdom he journeys through, Thomas realizes early on, that there will be no going back, there would be no going back to the part of him that had been buried for so many years, and there would be no more glimpses of that forgotten life. Going to Club Bathysphere exposed the need in Thomas, the ache - the hollowness that lay beneath a life so seemingly well ordered, even charmed. Fragments of another life had been released, altering him forever. His experiences lead him to admit that everything he had built had been revealed for what it was - "mere scaffolding."

Thompson evokes a bleak, desolate, almost apocalyptic world, where the psychological outlines of the different Quarters are sharply defined; its landscape of fleeting female figures, semi-erotic encounters, and of canals, waterways, and even underwater seas. It's also a world of transient, almost spiritual figures, fighting for survival in cities that embody all that is selfish and self-absorbed about capitalism.

Although the narrative tends to lose impetus towards the end, Divided Kingdom is mostly a gripping saga, a part adventure story, and part treatise on the human experience, a portrait of a world that is divided into a type of "psychological racism," where misguided authorities " have force-fed us our own weakness - our intolerance, our bigotry, to create a world where the people seem to need it, and even thrive on this type of prejudice." Mike Leonard November 05.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars ignore the premise, enjoy the ride if you can/, March 22, 2006

By 

B. Capossere (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Divided Kingdom (Hardcover)

Divided Kingdom begins with the main character, 8 years old, rousted out of his bed the night the kingdom (a parallel sort of Britain gone to misery and chaos) is divided into quarters based on the four humours in a last ditch attempt to salvage society. Hustled off to a reeducation facility, Thomas Perry is eventually transferred to a family still grieving over the loss of their wife/mother in the Red "sanguine" quarter, where he gradually moves up the political ladder within the ministry responsible for assignments/transfers. The book really starts going when he is sent to a conference in another quarter. There, in a club called the Bathyscope (it reminded me somewhat of Steppenwolf's theater), he sees images/scenes that drive him to skip out on his responsibilities and began a border-crossing trek that will eventually bring him to all four quarters.

The premise of the story isn't all that plausible. The fact that it is barely explored in any pragmatic/realistic sense leads one to think it isn't meant to be seen as particularly plausible anyway. Much as Parry does in the Bathyscope. the reader is being taken on a dreamlike experience and shouldn't look for the nuts and bolts dystopia of an Orwell or Bradbury.

And dreamlike it is, as Parry moves among the various citizens of each quarter, encountering a wide variety of character types, including the mysterious White People, those who can't be assigned a humour (they don't seem to gravitate towards one) and who move in speechless, nomadic packs.

Kingdom is a hard novel to pin down. As mentioned, it doesn't work at all on a pragmatic dystopic level as nothing of how the societies function or not is ever really explored. And for me, it only worked hit and miss on the more surreal level. There is strong writing in much of it, though sometimes overly noticeable as crafted. There are as well some moving sections and moments that deserve some pause and meditation. But its picaresque plot never really compelled, nor did the character, and while I followed what happened it was with somewhat moderate interest. The ending, unfortunately, I thought the weakest section and so that colored the entire reading somewhat negatively

I can't say Divided Kingdom pulled me along or startled me with its language or style except for every now and then. It was a serviceable read with moments of highlights, but the latter part diluted those moments for me. I'd be interested to read more by the author for his inventiveness and his ability to create a beguiling tone/atmosphere, but I can't really strongly recommend Divided Kingdom.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Divided We Stand, United We Fall, September 12, 2006

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Divided Kingdom (Paperback)

That is the premise of Rupert Thomson's dystopian novel "Divided Kingdom". Set in the United Kingdom, a group of unseen, unknown `powers that be' have determined that British society is decaying. Hopelessness, despair, and dysfunction are the hallmarks of the political and economic life of a once great nation. The solution: take Great Britain and divide it into four mini-Britains each separated from the other by a wall similar to the one that used to divide Berlin. People are not permitted to travel from one section to the next. The key to this subdivision of Britain is the "great rearrangement".

Each mini-Britain will be segregated by personality type. Every citizen is assessed and assigned to one of four personality types based on the ancient concept of the four humors: Choleric (yellow), melancholic (green), phlegmatic (blue) and sanguine (red). `Sanguine' people, who are optimistic and even-tempered, must reside in the Red Quarter. `Phlegmatics' are passive and compassionate and tend to let life carry them along like a leaf floating on a stream. They are assigned to the Blue Quarter. `Cholerics' are aggressive, Type-A people assigned to live in the Yellow Quarter, `Melancholics' are introspective and pessimistic, and must live in the Green Quarter. The great rearrangement is planned under great secrecy and the people of Britain wake up one morning to see that the military is supervising the forced shipment of every citizen to their assigned quarter.

As the story opens eight-year old protagonist, Thomas Parry, is snatched from his parents home and placed in a school pending his transfer to the red section. Thomas is placed with a family whose wife/mother has been forcibly sent to another quarter. Thomas adjusts well, on the surface at least, to the great rearrangement. He eventually becomes a trusted government employee and is asked to cross the border to attend a multilateral conference attended by all four groups. It is a rare privilege for Thomas to cross the border. It is only after he arrives that all the angst that Thomas had kept buried inside begins to come to the fore. Thomas receives an invitation to a strange, exotic club and the club unleashes such powerful, unfathomable forces within Thomas that he drops everything and embarks on a journey that takes him across the four kingdoms.

Thomas' journey is a journey of self-examination. However, Thomson does a great job providing something of a travelogue through each of the four kingdoms. Thomson does a great job fleshing out Thomas' character. However, given the large cast of characters who Thomas encounters those secondary characters do tend to have a somewhat superficial portrayal. The fact that these characters tend to live up to their personality assignment does make their portrayal seem logical within the confines of the book.

The book's concept is an excellent one and the plot is both original and entertaining. The plot allows Thomson and the reader the opportunity to explore the role of the individual's role in society, the role of the family, and the individual's concept of self and sense of affiliation with the community around him. Thomson's dystopian vision has its roots in Aldous Huxley's "BRAVE NEW WORLD" and also Yevgeny Zamyatin's "WE".

"Divided Kingdom" does have some flaws (in my opinion). At one point some of the characters exhibit some almost supernatural powers. One character seems to be able to render her invisible. I found this to be a bit of a distraction and came across as an easy way to get Thomas and the other character across a border. Ultimately this is not a major problem but it left me seeing those books as being somewhat separate from the story as a whole. However, this quibble should not detract from Thomson's well-executed prose. It is concise and adheres successfully to the less-is-more school of fiction. Thomson does not bludgeon the reader with conclusions or answers. Rather, he tells a story in a fairly minimalist style and leaves the rest to the thought processes of his readers.

All in all "Divided Kingdom" is an entertaining, thought provoking book. Highly recommended. L. Fleisig