Book Review: Red Rising by Pierce Brown

My first ever 0-star review for this blog.

I have received a few requests from people outside the classics community in my personal life to read and review this novel for quite a while. While I understand why it’s been heralded as a work leaning on the classics, I was crestfallen to find out how little that was true. At most, it can be said to embrace Roman names as an aesthetic choice, which is harmful to the perception of the classics at best and can lead readers down the path to fascism at worst.

As stated above, this novel’s marketing bills it as a work that concerns itself with the ancient world, or at least pays some sort of tribute to Greco-Roman culture. This is not an accurate portrayal of the work whatsoever. At first, it appears as though the general direction of the plot will take Darrow, the main character, as a kind of Spartacus-like revolutionary who will lead his people out of the mines. Soon after it’s revealed that Mars operates on a hyper-capitalist economy, and that not only is that not the goal, but pursuing such revolutionary actions would be a blip on the radar according to Darrow’s elders. Later on, the reader is led to believe that at the very least the structure of the military would mirror the ancient world’s, but the possibilities of siege warfare are avoided at all costs, and all the combat follows a culture much closer to the Napoleonic era. As more truths of Mars’ societal structure are revealed, the plot draws closer parallels to the conflict between the Irish and the English throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Though I do believe this to be an important period worth covering in analogous works of fiction, I don’t appreciate being misled in this way.

Frankly, it would be a mystery why the author picked Greco-Roman aesthetics to attach to the structure of this work if it wasn’t so glaringly obvious. The English have established houses of nobility with a long history of heraldic symbolism that he could have borrowed from, but readers are less interested in those aesthetics. If Brown had followed that path, it would have required the novel to carry itself on his writing and the plot, the latter of which is derivative of fad surrounding The Hunger Games, while the former has merit but is unfortunately not enough to sell a novel anymore. Instead, he gives the characters and their houses names that act as shortcuts for teens to remember one vague characteristic or another that lay mythology has tied to the relevant figure. This does not honor its ancestry, but uses it as a stepping-stone to make a quick buck off gifted kids the same way J.K. Rowling did. This isn’t “symbolism” as much as it is word association. It’s cheap, tacky, and often gets mistaken for hard work by the layman.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do a class-based uprising in fiction. The right way is through establishing a protagonist’s virtues and good moral character. The bad way is how this novel merely thrusts Darrow into the upper classes. His education comes from a machine straight out of The Venture Bros., and the efficacy might as well be the same. In Frankenstein, for example, the reader learns that the monster has been changed by Goethe, Plutarch, and Milton’s works because of the reverence with which he talks about them. Here, the reader is meant to trust that Darrow’s 500x speed audiobook summary of the Iliad has taught him all the complexities of Achilles’ rage based on the author’s word that the technology suffices. It would be one thing if the series pulled a Dune and turned Darrow into the next Space Hitler, but the way the Red faction turns real education in the classics into My Fair Lady would, in reality, leave him woefully unprepared for any real leadership situation. Teaching children that the best qualities for leadership are “grit” or “ambition” without emphasizing intelligence or morality is how you end up with fascism.

This is the first book review that I will assign no stars to, because this book does not merit reading. If you want to read this book, read Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Everything good about Red Rising can be found in that book without all the negatives. The one element missing from that which is present here is combat, in which case you’re better off with a swashbuckling novel along the lines of Horatio Hornblower. Avoid, avoid, avoid.