Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
Translated by Yuji Oniki
578 pages
Published 1999; English translation published 2003
Read from March 21 to March 29
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Lots of spoilers ahead; brief mention of sexual abuse.
I hate to reveal my lack of references again, but in all honesty Battle Royale reminded me of nothing but Michael Crichton. A Michael Crichton writing for teens and trying too hard to be hip, then translated with a tin ear into another language, but Michael Crichton all the same. Perhaps the thriller, as a genre, has constricted conventions of how a story should be told and how characters should be depicted. The shallow, cliche-based characters (the swishing, sneaking homosexual! the brilliant, unfeeling psychopath! the seemingly innocent schoolgirl turned evil by a lifetime of sexual abuse! not one but two brilliant and multitalented hackers! the attractive rock star everyman!) were all conventional thriller cannon fodder; the action sequences and unlikely physical feats were pure Crichton; the quick peek inside the head and history of a side character who immediately gets snuffed is a Crichton staple; even the island map in the frontispiece and the map-grid-as-plot-device seemed drawn from a forgotten Crichton work. I half expected dinosaurs to crash out of the forest and crunch up some students at various points -- which, by my standards, would have been a huge improvement. The insipid, overly descriptive prose I'm willing to blame on a combination of translation and differing storytelling expectations, but excusing its origin doesn't make it more engaging. On top of all that, I found the "twists" predictable, even banal.
Which isn't to say I totally hated it. I enjoyed Sakamochi's cheerful approach to "instructing" his "class," and I found myself almost moved a couple times in spite of myself. But I just can't forgive a book that ends with song lyrics, as if fading out into cinematic end credits over a freeze-frame of the two survivors running off into their next adventure.
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