Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Rating: 2/5, bad

If Red Rising were food, it would be a bloody steak. Partly because much of its appeal is in the prolific and clever violence, but also because it’s left a little undercooked.

Red Rising is about a young man named Darrow, a Red miner, who is tasked with becoming a Gold elite and destroying the oppressive system from within.

Pierce Brown writes of a world where the population has been genetically modified into a rainbow of different classes. These classes include Red miners, Pink sex slaves, Gold overlords, Green technicians, Obsidian guards, and Purple artists. The people were actually modified to have hair and eyes that match their social class. It feels a little obvious, but it mirrors the way physical features are often thought to signify class in our world. It’s very interesting to read a book where race is not just socially but artificially constructed.

There’s a lot of different artificial races, but I don’t think any of them have dark skin and I didn’t catch any allusions or metaphors for black people, which is weird for a book by an American about slavery and social hierarchy. The closest thing is the Browns, who are servants, and according to the Red Rising wiki no Browns are even named in the whole series (ack!).

And it’s not as though it’s a fantasy setting with no allusions to real-world races. The lowest class, the Reds, are basically Irish people. They have red hair, they like dancing and drinking and swearing, and they believe that you go to a “vale” with green grass and sheep and an old man when you die. The Obsidians seem to be based on Vikings, and can even speak Icelandic for some reason.

I’m not saying that every white writer needs to write about black people for a diversity quota, but it’s conspicuous in 2018 for a book by an American author with slavery as its major theme to not make any allusions to black or brown people, except to make them servants in the margins of the story.

Moving on with this review, this book suffers from the same problem that Who Fears Death did in that Darrow starts out trying to right the wrongs of the system, but so far he’s mostly just becoming a part of it. He enters The Institute (an academy for Gold children) and plays a kind of Game-of-Thrones – I mean Hunger Games – I mean Battle Royale – I mean Lord of the Flies – I mean, the children are thrown into a survivalist conflict where only one *cough* Harry Potter *cough* House will win. The Houses are all named after Roman Gods (Jupiter, Venus, Mars, etc). I feel the Neoclassical thing is really done to death, but the sheer brutality of the rules of The Institute makes it feel a little bit fresher (I’m trying not to spoil here).

The leader of the winning house will have more power in the real world after leaving The Institute. This is Darrow’s goal – to make it out on top, become a leader in Gold society, and end the oppression of his people. Darrow makes a nod to democracy, but overall he seems to be conquering with force, intelligence, and manipulation. He engages in a lot of guerrilla warfare, opting to strike as fast and quietly as possible before his enemies know he’s coming.

He has help in this respect from his charming friend Sevro, my favorite character, who has little respect for anything, wears a wolf pelt, and lives like a wild man. Sevro had built up a small pack of wolf-men and women who Darrow makes use of in his strategies to take over different houses. Eventually, Darrow and everyone else who follows Darrow picks up the habit of wearing wolf pelts, using sneak attacks, and howling in battle. It’s undeniably cool, but it feels a little adolescent sometimes.

The medieval warfare portion of the book is kind of fun, but it’s really bloody and not very smart. It’s a just-sit-back-and-enjoy-the-gore kind of thing, which sadly I really enjoyed. I have to say this book made me question my morality a little bit… it definitely appeals to the latent viciousness of the reader’s human nature. The narrative is very manly and aggressive, like its protagonist.

Another character casually guesses Darrow’s name origin: “driven arrow”. Darrow is very focused on his goal of rising to the top and changing the system. He’s supposed to be different from a fascist leader, but he only seems to care about other people to the extent that they are useful to him and to his cause. In life or death conflicts, he’s very quick to kill the other person instead of questioning or subverting the rules of the game.

Earlier in the book, they point a point about “extrapolational thinking” – basically, thinking outside the box. As a test for joining the resistance, he is presented with a bowl with two cards in it, and he is told that if he picks the lamb card, he can join the resistance, and if he picks the scythe card, he can’t. Darrow eats both the cards. I wish the narrative showed Darrow doing more of the extrapolational thinking with regards to changing the structure of the game instead of just breaking the rules to win.

He does do one thing which kind of goes against his own interests, but only superficially. When one of his subordinates misbehaves, he whips them and then orders them to whip him back, because they’re all one and if he’s whipped with them it will strengthen the bonds between leader and followers. This is supposed to sound ground-breaking and democratic, but it still seems pretty fascist to me. Fascism is the consolidation of power, like one stick on its own is easily broken, but many sticks tied in a bundle are strong. If Darrow’s still the only one who calls the shots in the end and there’s no one to check or balance him, that’s still fascism.

I haven’t decided if I want to keep reading this series or not yet. Series books annoy me because I’m a slow reader and they like to put things off into the next book to keep you reading and get you to spend more money, so I tend to feel like my quality of attention is not being rewarded and I’m being strung along. I’d really like to find out who decided to make society artificially stratified, why, and how that came to pass. I’d also really like to know what Darrow does to help his people once he’s in power. But I don’t feel super optimistic that these things will be explained, or that they will be explained in a satisfying way.

I’ll have to look at Goodreads and see. If you have any opinions about the book or whether I should or shouldn’t finish reading the series, let me know in the comments!