This just wasn't for me. It was a mixture of info dumps and, oddly enough, vagueness. There was a general feeling of incompleteness to the stories.

Jesse Bell drew me in with the premise of The Diver's Game. I just didnt feel the story kept the promise of the premise. Overall, I found the world created to be quite uncomfortable. The characters were complex but I wanted to see more character change and growth. The story ended rather abruptly and I wasnt satisfied.
I received my copy through NetGalley under no obligation/.

Ball’s latest novel is a very odd story with no discernible plot. He leaves so many of the details of his futuristic world for readers to glean from contextual clues, which gets old rather quickly. I am still not certain what point he is trying to make here. There is the obvious aspect of a world divided into a very clear us versus them, haves versus have-nots, immigrants versus those who were citizens before an unspecified date, but that is too obvious for Ball. The whole thing is very chaotic and unsettled, with one-third of the story completely deviating from the rest of it. This is definitely not as fluid as his previous novel, which I enjoyed. I did not enjoy this one.

Speculative fiction has been used as a vehicle to comment on societal woes for about as long as there has been speculative fiction. In the right hands, the flexibility of genre opens up a tremendous literary toolbox, one that offers a combination of wildly vivid creations and complex cultural commentary.

Hands like Jesse Ball's.

Ball’s latest novel is “The Divers' Game.” It’s a story of a society not so unlike our own, one extrapolated out from our current place into something darker - but not that much darker. Ball’s world is a challenging journey into the depths of man’s capability to other and the fractured functionality of a culture structured around that othering.

What elevates this work above the usual dystopian dive is Ball’s prose. His unique literary sensibility brings a bleak lyricism to the narrative, a fluidity of form. All of it devoted to creating not just the tragic segregation of this new world, but also the complicated characters that inhabit it.

In this world, the concept of inherent equality no longer exists. This world is not about fairness; instead, it is about rigidly adhering to the circumstances of our existence. There are two kinds of people – pats and quads. Only here’s the thing – in society’s eyes, there is only one kind of person.

Because quads are not people.

In the eyes of the law, quads are merely things. They may be killed by pats with impunity, for any reason. It is not a crime to kill a quad; they must simply move through the world knowing that their lives could be ended at any time. Pats are equipped with both poisonous gas and gas masks – both government-issued – that may be unleashed on quads for any reason. Quads are branded and otherwise marked to ensure that they are easily identifiable.

We move from perspective to perspective, meeting a number of residents of this world. There’s the broken-down academic who gets sweet-talked into taking two students with him on a research trip to a bleak, barren zoo. There’s the boy being harshly questioned about the disappearance of one of his friends. There’s the young girl who has received an honored position at the head of a celebratory parade that is being held for the first time in years. And on and on and on.

We spend time with pats and quads alike, getting snapshot glimpses of their world, a lived-in place that is often shown but rarely explained. The shadows cast by heavily-guarded walls loom large, laying a sinister gloom. Fear is a constant – some cause it, others suffer it, but all are impacted by it.

“The Divers’ Game” is literary speculation at its finest. This isn’t the first dystopian vision that Ball has constructed, but he’s shown that there’s far more to be mined from this vein than one could ever extract in a single work. This new novel is a perfect illustration of that, combining a descriptive deftness with a thematic confidence – Ball doesn’t feel to spell things out or saddle the reader with unnecessary exposition. The ideas and images he deems important are the ones he places front and center; he simply expects us to follow his lead.

And it is a lead well worth following.

Ball’s work is unique, infused with a thoughtful and idiosyncratic style unlike any other writer you’re likely to encounter. That voice echoes loudest in the simplest moments, capturing the irregular details that ground the narrative in a place of verisimilitude despite the esoteric nature of the setting. It’s a world that feels real. And worse, it’s a world that feels somehow plausible. Not likely, really … but plausible. That unsettling undercurrent flows just beneath the story’s surface, lending a sense of pathos and quiet desperation to every person’s journey.

What kind of morality is born of a society with no expectation of compassion? Do we care about our fellow man because we want to or because we’re supposed to? If there’s no cultural imperative to be “good” – what happens? Is the potential for goodness actually part of human nature? Or is it just another construct, one that would quickly disappear without societal pressure?

“The Divers’ Game” is the sort of work that one points to when singing the praises of speculative fiction as “serious” literature. Through his incredible craftsmanship and narrative sophistication, Jesse Ball is able to access the incredible thematic depths potentiated by these speculative tropes. Beautifully conceived, packed with emotional complexity and challenging detail, this book is another outstanding offering from a unique literary voice.

This inimitable, nail-biting novel imagines a world divided into two groups — those with power and impunity and those rendered to tyranny — with opposing ideas of humanity under the heel of an unforgiving nation. Can't wait to pore over the rest of Ball's canon.

This novel has me so confused. They way the dialog is written and formatted it’s hard to tell who is who when talking. This dystopian novel is set in a time where lower class is branded and thumbs taken. For what purpose? I honestly didn’t understand! The middle of the novel then switches to focus on Lessor, a different person than the two first characters Lois and Lethe. And then it goes into the divers game section. I feel like the meaning of this book just went straight over my head. It is creepy that this is set in a world where there are no living animals left and the high class all wear has masks but can also use the canisters to kill others. I’m just so baffled about this. I’m not sure this type of novel is for me.

Ball writes of an eerie, dystopian future where people are sorted into two categories quads and pats. Quads, who are deemed a lower class of people, have their thumbs chopped off and are branded. Ball explains how this future came to be which mirrors what is happening across the globe today with an influx of nationalism and xenophobia.

Ball's story is set over a few days with simple prose that keeps the story quickly moving. The book is broken up in short vignettes featuring a different character with each flowing into another. The story is a dark one but also an important one.

The Diver’s Game is a painful book to read in Trump’s America. It is set in a society that has embraced inequality, not only of outcomes but of opportunities. Ball imagines a society that feels beset by refugees. They decide to let them in if they can tell them apart from the citizens or pats. So they brand them with a red hat on their faces. Then they cut off their thumbs. Then they decide they have no standing in law so any action against them, even killing them, is not violence. Then they segregate them in “quads” from which they get their name.

This is a novel told in stories with simple, declarative prose that gives it the sensibility of a folk tale. This makes it feel immediate. It has an emotional power that would be lost with more explication.

There is the fantastical absurdism of it all. We want to deny this possibility. The first story is about Lois and Lethe, two schoolgirls in a class where the teacher is lecturing on the principles of their society. He invites them to the zoo, something unimaginable to them. There the true horror of this world begins to be suspected. The title story is about dangerous game children play to show their courage. There is a story about a ritual called the Infanta that gets more horrifying by the second. The final story takes us full circle, back to that professor and his wife, who writes him a letter after coming to understand what kind of world they live in.



The Diver’s Game sounds so extreme, doesn’t it? But then Brian Kilmeade defending separating children, even infants, from their parents and locking them in cages by saying, “Like it or not, these aren’t our kids. Show them compassion, but it’s not like he’s doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country.” That really not that different. The pats said they were showing the quads compassion, too.

This is a horrifying book but that is because it builds on where we are now and fully draws out what the final implications of our xenophobia are. Ball asked what might we do, but perhaps given out history the real question is what won’t we do?

The Diver’s Game will be released on September 10th. I received an e-galley from the publisher through NetGalley.

The Diver’s Game at Harper Collins
Jesse Ball author site

How can a book be so short and stab me in the heart so deeply? Beautifully written, with somehow fully fleshed out characters and settings in just a few paragraphs.

Sometimes there’s a narrator who leads you around the story, acting as a tour guide, but almost conspiratorially. It feels like breaking the rules, like you’re doing something naughty when the book takes you by the hand and reminds you that you’re following characters in a story. And it just made me grin, each time, as if the story and I are in this together.

And then sometimes the characters are intensely personal. People who are flawed, trying to survive in a hellscape that sometimes seems like the not-so-distant future, but who still stop to notice the sun setting. The writing broke my heart and I hope it never heals.

It’s also one that I think will grow in scope and take a tighter shape each time I read it. It’s a thrilling feeling, to finish a book for the first time and know as soon as you set it down that you’ll be returning to it again and again.

REVIEW
Having read Jesse Ball’s Census, I was glad to receive an advance copy of The Divers’ Game. This book plunges readers into a dark, dystopian world. This world that has abandoned any glimmer of equality is a shadowscape of contemporary society. It’s a cautionary tale about the destruction of unchecked power delivered in an impressionistic voice that Ball has mastered.


AUTHOR
Jesse Ball was born in New York. He is the author of fifteen books, most recently the novel Census. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is a winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. He was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Pub date: September 10, 2019

Jesse Ball creates a fascinating dystopian world and allows us to see it through the eyes of young people. Their perspective on violence and other societal horrors prove to be cavalier at times, as this is the only way of life they’ve ever known. Sharp and dark.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.