Product Description

It is winter, somewhere in the United Kingdom, and an eight-year-old boy is removed from his home and family in the middle of the night. He learns that he is the victim of an extraordinary experiment. In an attempt to reform society, the government has divided the population into four groups, each representing a different personality type. The land, too, has been divided into quarters. Borders have been established, reinforced by concrete walls, armed guards and rolls of razor wire. Plunged headlong into this brave new world, the boy tries to make the best of things, unaware that ahead of him lies a truly explosive moment, a revelation that will challenge everything he believes in and will, in the end, put his very life in jeopardy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94366 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
'Sharply written One of his great strengths, in a genre that usually takes physical description as read, is an ability to evoke a landscape' Guardian 'The ideas behind Thomson's novel buzz with originality, sparking contemporary connections and recalling Brave New World and even Gulliver's Travels Divided Kingdom thrums with ideas and is a moving and, at times, gripping book' Observer 'This book is brave in a Brave New World kind of way, and should earn Thomson tons of readers' Esquire 'A hyper-real hallucination lit by sumptuous prose and fuelled by a prodigal gift for atmosphere and suspense' Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Observer
‘Recalling Brave New World and even Gulliver’s Travels … thrums with ideas and is a moving and gripping book’

Sunday Telegraph
‘Thomson creates a portrait of Britain that is seductively detailed, disorienting, sometimes funny and often horrifying’

Customer Reviews

Superb stuff
A boy is taken from his parents in the middle of the night when the government decides to re-arrange the country according to personality type. Borders and guards are put in place creating four quarters of the country, each quarter very different from the next, as are its inhabitants. Or are they so different? How does society cope with these imposed classifications and restrictions? Do people become what they are told they are?
When an opportunity arises for this boy, now a man, to escape the life he has been forced to live for 27 years he seizes it and we follow his amazing journey as he crosses borders, both geographically and within.
I don't think I will ever forget some of the places and imagery in this novel. The White People, The Museum of Tears, The Bathyshpere night club, are just some of the gems from the authors brilliant imagination.
If you want a book that will immerse you and take you elsewhere, while subtly leading you to think more about the world we live in then this book will be right up your quarter!

All Air and No Fire
Five and a half years is the longest gestation period for a Rupert Thomson novel yet, and a tantalising delay for fans of his previous erudite, original, imaginative fiction. On reading however I can only feel that the delay was due to lack of inspiration, because this is easily Thomson's worst book since The Five Gates of Hell and possibly his worst ever.
The idea is an intriguing one: the United Kingdom has become the divided kingdom (although I never picked up on the pun or association of the two phrases until it was explicity mentioned in the text), the government having become tired of thuggery, brutality and conflict within our land. It decides to divide the country into four, separated by guarded walls and peopled according to personality type: sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic (linked to the old anatomical idea of the four bodily humours of yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood). Our hero is designated sanguine, and is taken away from his parents at the age of eight or so, and given a new name and a new family in the Red Quarter.

I enjoyed the first hundred pages or so, although a few problems were evident too, mainly Thomson's attempted portrayal of a period of ten or fifteen years in a matter of a few dozen pages. With no chapter breaks or proper pacing, it doesn't seem to make sense, particularly as the rest of the book will cover just a few months. The relationships between Thomas Parry - our hero's new name - and his new father Victor and sister Marie are well done, although I did find myself wondering why he never once pined for his real parents whom he had known for almost ten years.

When Parry goes to work for the government, however, the whole thing just falls apart. Thomson has no ideas for a plot other than to explore the four different quarters - five if you count the lives of White People, who are designated none of the four personality types and so live on the fringes of society - which leads to squeaking of crowbars as he puts Parry on a plane to the violent Yellow Quarter for a conference, then a randomly placed (by the author) bomb infuses Parry with an anarchistic vibe - even though his personality surely decrees that this would not happen - and he decides to slope off to the Blue Quarter, where the Phlegmatics live. Because this is the least well-defined personality type, Thomson makes it associated with water instead, for an alternative theme, and the whole thing starts to feel like an episode of The Crystal Maze. Then a shipwreck lands him in the melancholic Green Quarter, and so on. Presumably the idea is that Parry's - and everyone's - personality is not immutable but is actually influenced by their surroundings.

By halfway through I was fed up to the back teeth with Divided Kingdom and it seemed for a time to be the most putdownable book I have ever read. After toiling at its pointless paragraphs for what seemed like hours, I had only passed ten pages. There are no other characters in it who stay long enough for us to get to know them, until Parry meets a young woman near the end when I was past caring. There are shifts of scene and tone so sudden that I started to wonder whether it was supposed to be a dreamscape, like Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, or something similar - and indeed Parry at one point wonders whether he died at the start of the book and everything that happened since has been his death - but in the end it appeared more that huge chunks had been chopped from the book, maybe half the original text in all, to make it more digestible - without success - but wildly compromising the coherence.

It feels like kicking a man when he's down to say all this - after all, Thomson has shown from his other books that he's a talented writer, and he's protean and interesting enough to deserve a break into the bigger time (read The Insult and The Book of Revelation for proof of this) - but you've got to trust your judgement in these things, and mine is that Divided Kingdom stinks like a five-and-a-half-year-old dead turkey. At last, I feel sure, Rupert Thomson will find critical and public opinion united, though perhaps not how he would hope.

In a recent interview Rupert Thomson said that Divided Kingdom is a real break from his other books as "it's the only book I've written than anyone could read." Is that an insufferably pompous statement or is it just me? In fact his other books are far more readable than Divided Kingdom. What he should have said of course is that it's the only book of his that anyone could write.

They took the worst part of us and built a system out of it
In Divided Kingdom society has become troubled and fragmented – obsessed with acquisition and celebrity, it is a place defined by misery, envy, and greed. Crime is rampant; the courts are swamped, the prisons overflowing, the divorce rate following marriage quickly and predictably. Faced with lawlessness and chaos, the current government – hidden in an underground bunker – is forced to make a radical decision.

The Kingdom is to be divided into four countries, this political solution, or "rearrangement" comes with considerable risk, but is seen as the only alternative to avert certain anarchy. Each citizen is psychologically assessed and placed, sometimes with force, into four administrative units, each corresponding to one of the medieval "humours."

There's the Red Quarter, inhabited by the cheerfully sanguine, and where Matthew Micklewright, our main protagonist, then aged eight, lives; the Yellow Quarter, where the choleric rage and beat each other up; the Blue Quarter, populated by the stoically phlegmatic; and the "Green Quarter that harbors melancholic depressives.

Concrete boundaries are thrown up, rigidly controlled by the border police, and each country is sealed, fearful of the threat of psychological contamination. The rearrangement deliberately manufactured to create a climate of suspicion and denial between each country – people burying parts of their personalities that don't fit, and hiding their secrets that could now be judged and condemned.

One night, as the roundup begins, young Matthew is cruelly separated from his parents and taken to an immensely sinister boarding school, where he is lectured on the Rearrangements political rationale. The country had become "a troubled place," an enthusiastic Miss Groves tells the class, and this resolution was seen as the only alternative. Subsequently our hero -now renamed Thomas Parry- is given a new family and groomed for advancement in the Red Quarter regime as a civil servant.

After years of studying and career diligence, Thomas is finally given the senior administrative job he has been aiming for; this involves the ongoing process of psychological testing and relocation of members of the population who fail to meet the demands of his quarter. Now he is able to attend commissions and attend cross-border conferences, a privilege available only to the autocratic elite.

Dispatched to a cross border conference in the Blue Quarter, Thomas clandestinely visits a nightclub, the Bathysphere. Shocking images of his past come back to haunt him, of his mother, and of his first true love. He isn't sure what to make of these memories, all he knows is that he has experienced something so totally profound and addictive that it skews his sanguine nature, setting him on a course of self-discovery as he travels through the divided kingdom's four quarters.

Thomas becomes caught up in a terror attack in the Yellow Quarter; is shipwrecked on the coast of the Blue Quarter, and is farmed off to an angst-ridden Green Quarter boarding house, eventually escaping and joining the itinerant and stateless White People, a band of nomadic outsiders who drift aimlessly from quarter to quarter, spurned and shunned by the populations of this new and unsettling world.

Reticent of Huxley's Brave New World, author Rupert Thomson, rather than focusing on the nuts and bolts, the mechanics of this dystopian world chooses instead, to chart Thomas's tortured emotional landscape, as he becomes an outlaw, a fugitive, traveling from quarter to quarter, experiencing first hand each facet of the human condition. Our hero starts off with such noble pursuits and intent, convinced that his role is safe guarding the values and integrity of the Red Quarter. "I realized that he had to fight for the system, had to believe in it, or my removal from my family will have been for nothing."

But as Thomas travels, and witnesses the Yellow Quarter's inhumanity, the Blue Quarter's innocently sweet nature, and the Green quarter's chronic depressives, he realizes that the divided kingdom is united after all, by just one thing: "longing," a longing by most people to perhaps be reunited again.

But like the Kingdom he journeys through, Thomas realizes early on, that there will be no going back, there would be no going back to the part of him that had been buried for so many years, and there would be no more glimpses of that forgotten life. Going to Club Bathysphere exposed the need in Thomas, the ache – the hollowness that lay beneath a life so seemingly well ordered, even charmed. Fragments of another life had been released, altering him forever. His experiences lead him to admit that everything he had built had been revealed for what it was – "mere scaffolding."

Thompson evokes a bleak, desolate, almost apocalyptic world, where the psychological outlines of the different Quarters are sharply defined; its landscape of fleeting female figures, semi-erotic encounters, and of canals, waterways, and even underwater seas. It's also a world of transient, almost spiritual figures, fighting for survival in cities that embody all that is selfish and self-absorbed about capitalism.

Although the narrative tends to lose impetus towards the end, Divided Kingdom is a mostly a gripping saga, a part adventure story, and part treatise on the human experience, a portrait of a world that is divided into a type of "psychological racism," where misguided authorities " have force-fed us our own weakness – our intolerance, our bigotry, to create a world where the people seem to need it, and even thrive on this type of prejudice." Mike Leonard November 05.