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A review by seanbennett
Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre by Max Brooks
3.0
For the first two thirds of Devolution, my rating kept steady at a low 4-star review. It was bit too on the nose with its critiques and obvious with the author's self-insert, but entertaining enough. The final act, though, left me with serious questions about the author's intent, leaving the book teetering on the precipice of 2 stars, buoyed only by a charitable assumption that Brooks did not mean to convey the message I parsed.
I'm sympathetic to a lot of the satire introduced in the first half. We're introduced to a cast made up mostly of well-off Americans living out the common misconception that being able to see the forest in your backyard is environmentally-friendly and in tune with nature. Indeed, there's no little gross naivete in how civilization romanticizes nature and primitive living as idyllic and the book initially does alright poking fun at the fundamental unpreparedness of the group faced with the adversity of surviving isolated in the woods.
Our protagonist starts off as helpless as the rest of them, but turns around a bit too quickly faced with the challenges of the plot. While adversity does bring out a person's character, as the group's one wizened member declares, it feels forced by the narration, particularly as the protagonist loses more and more of her voice and reads increasingly only as a surrogate of the author.
The looming winter turns out to be the least of the group's problems as an especially vicious group of sasquatches descend. The humans' responses again fail to recognize the severity of the situation and Brooks rightly critiques the sometimes overgenerous naivete in our society towards negotiation and conflict with an adversary looking for nothing less than to aggress, subjugate, or exterminate.
Again, there's no little truth to that criticism. But what started to elicit a huge YIKES! from me was the out-of-nowhere interstitial beginning the final act. The aside yanks us briefly from our fantastical, black-vs-white, monster-vs-human fiction into the setting of Israel's conflicts with its neighbors. Particularly in light of current events in Palestine as of this review, this pulled me out of the in-progress valorization of our protagonist's evolving will to fight for her community and loved ones, reminding me of exactly why centuries of liberal thought has understandably downplayed such narratives: the language of defense of ones own community against extermination by a monstrous "other" has been a slanderous weapon of victimizer as much as, if not more than, a desperate rallying cry from the victimized.
Depicting an otherized group as essentially subhuman or replacing them in fiction with literal monsters to gain plausible deniability or stoke greater fear is a tactic as old as racism itself. Brooks knows this! He's spoken out against hatred against various groups in the wake of 7 Oct. But if it's his intent that we question the righteousness of our protagonist or be taken aback by her ultimate determination to abandon her humanity in favor of exterminating the entire species of which a tiny band killed her loved ones, I detected nary a hint.
I'm sympathetic to a lot of the satire introduced in the first half. We're introduced to a cast made up mostly of well-off Americans living out the common misconception that being able to see the forest in your backyard is environmentally-friendly and in tune with nature. Indeed, there's no little gross naivete in how civilization romanticizes nature and primitive living as idyllic and the book initially does alright poking fun at the fundamental unpreparedness of the group faced with the adversity of surviving isolated in the woods.
Our protagonist starts off as helpless as the rest of them, but turns around a bit too quickly faced with the challenges of the plot. While adversity does bring out a person's character, as the group's one wizened member declares, it feels forced by the narration, particularly as the protagonist loses more and more of her voice and reads increasingly only as a surrogate of the author.
The looming winter turns out to be the least of the group's problems as an especially vicious group of sasquatches descend. The humans' responses again fail to recognize the severity of the situation and Brooks rightly critiques the sometimes overgenerous naivete in our society towards negotiation and conflict with an adversary looking for nothing less than to aggress, subjugate, or exterminate.
Again, there's no little truth to that criticism. But what started to elicit a huge YIKES! from me was the out-of-nowhere interstitial beginning the final act. The aside yanks us briefly from our fantastical, black-vs-white, monster-vs-human fiction into the setting of Israel's conflicts with its neighbors. Particularly in light of current events in Palestine as of this review, this pulled me out of the in-progress valorization of our protagonist's evolving will to fight for her community and loved ones, reminding me of exactly why centuries of liberal thought has understandably downplayed such narratives: the language of defense of ones own community against extermination by a monstrous "other" has been a slanderous weapon of victimizer as much as, if not more than, a desperate rallying cry from the victimized.
Depicting an otherized group as essentially subhuman or replacing them in fiction with literal monsters to gain plausible deniability or stoke greater fear is a tactic as old as racism itself. Brooks knows this! He's spoken out against hatred against various groups in the wake of 7 Oct. But if it's his intent that we question the righteousness of our protagonist or be taken aback by her ultimate determination to abandon her humanity in favor of exterminating the entire species of which a tiny band killed her loved ones, I detected nary a hint.