“Matched” by Allie Condie
I’m on a dystopian bender lately, so I was curious to see the world Allie Condie imagined for her Matched trilogy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but was reminded by a reviewer at Goodreads, that the Matched dystopian future is largely that of Lois Lowry’s Newbery Award winning The Giver. Yes, Condie expands on it, somewhat, but the building blocks are the same: totalitarian government, mates and jobs chosen for individuals, restrictions on activities, and constant surveillance.
Condie’s protagonist is Cassia Reyes, a 15 year old girl. Like Jonas in The Giver, she slowly comes to realize the restrictions of her world, and the freedoms that have been taken away. The catalyst in this teen book marketed to girls, though, is a chaste love triangle. Cassia is matched with her best friend Xander, but a glitch in the system says she is also matched with Ky, who has a complicated history. It’s a similar triangle to that of The Hunger Games, with Xander as Peeta and Ky as Gale, though this one will end with Cassia and Ky together. No need to read the next two books for that. For that matter, probably no need to read this book–one can just tell from the back copy.
I was not at all moved or interested in the love triangle. I found it predictable and dull. Cassia was not a particularly interesting narrator to me. I longed for flawed, impulsive, gawky Meg from L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, even as Cassia’s world reminded me of the one in that book, Camazotz.
The plot turns over a supposedly difficult decision Cassia has to make. I found the decision contrived, Cassia’s action (and its complementary better action) predictable, and the result also predictable, although it was meant be be moving and involving.
What interested me in this book were aspects of the world Condie expanded on from the Giver: how 100 works were chosen from each art, so that all citizens could have a similar cultural legacy (which reminds me of E.D. Hirsch, who I never liked, precisely because of the totalitarian, exclusionary, privileged bias his campaign for Cultural Literacy implied to me.) and how works survived beyond those that were selected.
I was also interested in how the society let individuals opt to be Matched or Single. The benefits of being Single were never explored, and I wished they had been. And this is an example of the overall problem I had with the book. A good dystopian tale pushes the reader to examine the compromises between freedom and safety. Ursula K. Leguin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” did this back in ‘73, and hers was an homage overtly to William James, and perhaps less consciously to Dostoevsky, who I happen to be reading now, in a lovely weird bit of synchronicity.
But in Matched, like The Giver and The Hunger Games and even A Wrinkle in Time, the deck is stacked, and the utopian society is a straw man. There’s not enough complexity to it, not enough benefit seen of the other side, to make it interested and complicated. And the lesson it’s conveying of the importance of individual freedom, choice, and creativity is pretty worn by now, having been explored more presciently in such works as Brave New World and 1984. Many would say it’s a lesson worth telling again and again. In Matched, I just wished it were surrounded by a better, less derivative story.