Book Review – Enclave
Books, Review | Professor Crazy | November 23, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Author: Kit Reed
Cover Artist: James Webb
Publisher: Tor Books
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: February 2009
Formula:
Take a bunch of teenagers, isolate them some place like an island (Lord of the Flies, Battle Royale, Enclave) or within a brutal suppressive educational system (Truancy), add large helpings of conflict and let their natural survival instincts kick in, and throw in the mix oppressive authority figures, and you have yourself the makings of a popular novel teens can identify with and critics hate to love or love to hate.
Sure, Enclave follows this formula, but that doesn’t make it bad, nor the least bit trite, even. It’s really quite a good book which I’d recommend. There’s nothing new under the sun, after all, as Ecclesiastes says – it’s the way in which an author works within the parameters of tried-and true settings and situations that either make a book good, bad, or indifferent. It’s the differences that distinguish the quality of such books, the variations upon the themes, the artistry of the author that makes set formulas seem exciting and new or the same old, same old dull crap. Each of the novels I mentioned are very good, though they are similar in their formulas.
In Enclave, set on the Earth in the near future, the ex-Marine Lt. Sarge Whitemore has the “courage and foresight” to imagine that we are in the end times. That appears to be his genuine belief, anyway, though the huge sums of money his charges’ parents have paid to him to both be rid of their uncontrollable hellions and to “protect” them from the horrors of the End Times (earthquakes, floods, rioting, terrorists, suicide bombers, mass riots, etc.) doesn’t hurt, either. He sets up a military type of school high up on the desolate Mount Clothos with the aid of his dedicated staff, and calls it the Academy. In his surety that what he’s doing is right, and in his obsessiveness, he’s like a modern-day Ahab.
The Academy or “enclave” is almost like a character itself. Sarge has made sure its GPS coordinates have been removed from all databases:
You won’t find us on any map. For reasons my IT guy Steve Joannides and I are not at liberty to explain, the coordinates dropped out of every known database. They will stay lost, thanks to Steve. It won’t matter who comes looking or what applications they use to run the search. They’ll never find us. And if push comes to shove and someone does show up, we are well fortified.
Every night after supper, the students are shown what is supposedly the news of that day, depicting all sorts of disasters, wars, famines, riots, bombings, etc. to drill into his charges’ heads that what he’s doing for them is right and in their best interests. This “news,” though, is actually prerecorded onto DVDs by Joannides. The are constructed of actual worldwide disasters and what they depict is real, but they present a very one-sided view of world events – the view that Sarge wants the kids to see and believe is the accurate portrayal of the way the world has become, and that he’s saved them from. Somewhat surprisingly, it works – the majority of the students believe that the Sarge is telling them the truth, and that what they see on the DVDs is what’s really going on in the world. They don’t want to be at the Academy, but they don’t like to think about the alternative, either – a world filled with hellfire and brimstone.
The novel is told from multiple POVs, ranging from those of staff members like Sarge, Cassie, the PA (physician’s assistant – she is in love with the Sarge, but realizes he’s prone to excesses), and that of Brother Benedictus (a monk who was living at Mount Clothos when Sarge first arrived, when it was an abbey and he was the last surviving Benedictine monk there. He grows much of the Academy’s fruits and vegetables inside of the Academy’s plexiglass dome) to those of some of the students, such as Killer Stade (a 12-year-old murderer who killed one of his teachers who tried to sexually abuse him), Sheela (an overweight teen girl who somehow manages to smuggle chocolate truffles into the Academy and feeds them to the girls who are popular and would likely make fun of her in the outside world – she does it both to feel as if they are her friends, and to get revenge on them by making them become overweight like herself), and Sylvie (she develops a secret romance with Joannides).
Not all of the students are taken in by the carefully constructed view of reality that Sarge, Joannides, Cassie, and the teachers present them. Killer Stade and his roommate, Teddy Regan (a member of the royal family of a small country whose parents have put him in the Academy because he suffers from grand mal epileptic seizures. Also, he sometimes is able to see future events like the assassination of other members of the royal family while undergoing his seizures, and this spooks his parents – overall, he’s an embarasment to them who they want to keep away from the public eye) figure out that Sarge has to be connecting to the Internet somehow, despite his telling them all that it’s impossible to do so there. They hatch a scheme to sneak into Sarge’s office at night and learn how he manages to do it, and then alter their computers so they can also log on to the Internet.
Unfortunately, their plan doesn’t work like they want it to. While at Sarge’s computer to supposedly show Stade an online role playing game called Regalia, Teddy decides to also check his e-mail. He clicks on something he shouldn’t, and infects Sarge’s – and everyone else’s – computers at the Academy with a nasty virus. 1’s and 0’s scroll down the computer screen, and turn it white. Even Stade’s turning the computer off and trying to reboot it doesn’t help. The protection and order that Sarge has gone to great lengths to ensure for the Academy is crashing down around him, just like the Academy’s computer system.
But that’s not the only problem the Academy faces – it’s also been infiltrated and infected by something much more deadly to its inhabitants: a type of plague that threatens to run rampant in their closed community and kill them all. Brother Benedict has been keeping secrets from Sarge, secrets which could have disastrous consequences. He has not told Sarge what happened to the other monks who’d lived and worshipped at the abbey – they had passed away one by one from a sort of plague. Whatever caused it still lurks, dormant, in the catacombs and crypts of the Academy. Not telling Sarge was bad enough, and weighs heavily on Benny’s conscience; but, as long as no one entered the catacombs to reawaken the plague, the residents of the Academy would likely have nothing to worry about.
Unfortunately, someone does enter the catacombs though. It’s a mysterious young man named Theron, who decided to hide and explore in the catacombs for some reason which he has forgotten. He’s forgotten because he’s become infected by the plague, and he drifts in and out of dream-like states, preferring the dreams to the reality of the illness he suffers from and his infected leg. Benny first saw him in the garden dome, in the distance, and the man was so youngand beautiful, Benny imagined he might be an angel from God come to speak to him. He hides and jealously guards the presence of the stranger from everyone, meeting him in the confessional box and bringing him food and medicine from the Infirmary.
Sarge and Cassie eventually discover Theron when Benny goes too far in questioning the stranger and he yells out for help. Cassie and Sarge find them with Theron’s hand on the old monk’s throat, though Theron has fainted from his sickness. Theron has wandered the halls of the Academy previous to this, exposing many of the students to the disease. He has brought death to the closed community, and it spreads like wildfire. The people infected by it cough and vomit up blood. The Infirmary is soon crowded with student who’ve come down with the disease, and Cassie is pretty much on her own to try to stem the tide of whatever it is causing the sickness, because the doctor – Doctor Dratch – is an alcoholic and is incompetent.
What happens when the carefully structured and ordered environment of the Academy breaks down? The author, Kit Reed, has written a very good take using the basic ingredients and framework of the tried-and-true formula I mentioned at the start of this review. The characters are all excellently drawn, with their own set of motivations, obsessions, and passions that drive them.
I wrote in a review elsewhere for Neal Asher’s book, Brass Man:
It is, in a way, a sort of Melvillian epic, like Moby Dick, with Ian Cormac, an Earth Central Security Agent both hunting down an interstellar dragon (called “Dragon”) possessing ancient Jain technology and also his arch-nemesis, Skellor.
Thinking about the two novels, both with characters who are similar in ways to Captain Ahab, made me wonder what other characters have this kind of personality in the scifi novels that you’ve might have read about and enjoyed. If you have any that come to mind, please let me know in the Read/Comment section of this site, and let me know how you liked this review of Enclave. For me, it was a thoroughly entertaining novel that was filled with characters who are richly depicted, and reading it makes me want to go out and read more books by this talented author.
Tags: Enclave, James Webb, Kit Reed, Science Fiction, Tor
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