Mercy!

The Office of Mercy by Ariel Djanikian
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This seems to be my year for reading dystopian fiction. Having commenced 2013 with THE HUNGER GAMES Trilogy; moving on to 25 PERFECT DAYS,;NEVER LET ME GO, and the terminally disappointing AVALON: THE RETREAT, I was ripe and ready for THE OFFICE OF MERCY. Truth be told, I loved it.

The OFFICE OF MERCY is set in the future. The majority of the population has been wiped out by an act of planned mass genocide some 300 years before the opening scenes of the novel. Following the failure of a group known as the Yangs to create their dreamed-of self sustaining utopia, a Storm of planned mass mercy killings depopulates the world, putting the seething, starving masses 'out of their misery'. The Alphas, successors to the Yangs, perpetrate the human extinction event, preserving their coterie of true believers in a collection of un-linked, bunkered domes, and begin to rebuild humanity in a more ordered way. The Alpha's new world order is based on a set of ethics that abhors suffering and seeks to eliminate all forms of it. Technology and psychological training has removed the baser elements of the human condition, including love and physical attachment. Generations of humans are grown and harvested en masse when the community has sufficient resources to support expansion, and each individual has a bank of spare parts to replace those organs worn out by age. There is no disease, pain or extremes of emotion. Life is calm, rational and ethical.

Unfortunately, not all of the great unwashed are euthanised successfully in the Storm. mIsolated pockets of humanity survive, outside the domes - reduced to a nomadic stone-age state. The inhabitants of the domes refer to these unfortunates as the 'Tribes'.

The central protagonist - Natasha - works in the Office of Mercy in the bunker known as America 5. The work of her office is to track the tribes who come within America 5's perimeter and sweep (euthanise) them. Since the tribes live uncontrolled lives and are subject to hunger, disease and eventually death, the Ethical Code of the Alphas (and their descendants) requires the Office to reduce the suffering of the afflicted tribes through mercy killings and includes guarding their empathy with metaphorical Walls.

Natasha struggles. She is not as adept as others at maintaining the Wall, which barricades emotion away allowing decisions to be made on a completely rational level. She begins to question the doctrine of the Alphas, and is torn by her feelings for Jeremy - an older inhabitant of America 5, to whom she has always felt inappropriately drawn.

As with all dystopian novels, our protagonist Natasha starts to question her world. She allows her Wall to fall down, experiencing Misplaced Empathy for a tribe Swept by the Office of Mercy. We follow Natasha as she learns about and questions the settlement. We share her struggle against the doctrine of the Ethical Code as snippets of America 5's history is revealed and as Natasha's innocence is stripped away.

While this novel has many tenets of a dystopian story, the twists will keep you guessing. I found myself questioning my own perceptions and values at various points of the book. Just when I thought I had made up my mind on who the good guys were, something changed, causing me to again question my assumptions. The ending won't satisfy everyone - and, if you're like me, it will leave you wanting to know what comes 'after'.

I really liked where this novel took me. A really good novel for inspiring discussions in a book club.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Group Viking for letting me have an advance copy.




View all my reviews