BOOK REVIEW: Fantasticland By Michael Bockoven
A modern day version of Lord of the Flies…some things never change.
I will admit that I never heard of this book before, but I was looking through the audible library looking to see what were some “included with membership” books since my daughter stole my available credits. The cover first caught my eye, and then when I looked a little closer at it and read the description, I was intrigued and immediately downloaded it.
I don’t regret it for a second. I really, really enjoyed this book. Admittedly, I did have a running comparison with Lord of the Flies by William Golding the entire time. Golding knew what he was doing and gave interviews on why he wrote the book the way he did. The end result of both books may be the same, but the thoughts behind Fantasticland definitely take into account current societal trends making some very subtle claims.
Unlike LOTF, this book revolves around 100+ people, primarily in the college age range with a handful of other adults who essentially are trapped in an amusement park after a devastating hurricane ravishes the Florida coast line. The mixed gendered group of young adults in, say, 2015 spend five weeks in a Disneyland-esce park. There is plenty of food, plenty of water and plenty of space that you would like to think that everyone would work together to wait it out. Nope, it doesn’t take long for the groups of friends to break off from each other and factions to form in the different areas of the park.
I loved the structure and writing style of this book. It is written through “transcripts” of interviews with the survivors in a basic oral history of the events. This adds an element of emotional and grief to the characters’ stories. When blinded with the truth of what happened, and their own coping process it makes the characters seem slightly unreliable.
The entire book is told in past tense from multiple different people sharing the horrors. How people turned on each other, killed each other, stole from each other, and questioned almost everything that happened. It becomes a documentary of the incident, and we were lucky enough to read the results of the investigative journalist’s research. Even in this structure, the plot is linear with one interview picking up where the last one leaves off with just enough overlap to see which factions are connected to which events.
The characters are wildly diverse. Through their interviews, you can begin to see when and how the situation deteriorated. The actions that caused it, and how everyone reacted differently to the crisis. I would like to think that this wouldn’t happen, but in society we see how people can turn on each other in times of hardship. Rioting, looting, assaulting others. What does this say?
You see the characters that did what they felt they needed to do to survive and overcome the threats of the other groups. They helped the sick and injured in the park, they tried to enforce equality around them. There is always the light in the dark.
You see the characters that took power and took advantage of the situation. Did these people who didn’t have any history of violence outside the park just need something to ignite their inner evil? Were they always capable of this? Would they have turned into monsters if they were never put through this experience? There are the same questions we asked in Golding’s classic.
This is a claim about society. Right or wrong, it’s there. Stated very clearly on the pages of the book. In the park, no cell phones were allowed. So take 100ish young adults who have spent basically their entire lives with a phone in their hand and social media accounts to share all of life’s ups and downs and remove it entirely. Take away the ability to cope and desocialization and is this really what we are left with?
Why then are the reactions of the characters so different when they are telling their sides of the story? Why do some have remorse and others don’t? I found it such an interesting look at human nature and the perception of reality.
Have you heard the phrase perception is reality? I believe that concept. How someone perceives a situation becomes reality in their head, and when confronted with the hard facts it can be extremely difficult to reconcile the two. The initial events that caused these people to break into groups were based on some perceptions of events spurred on by faults of the amusement park. When you are in a dark tunnel and the lights go out, you can tell exactly what happens, but when the lights come back on you have to fill in the holes, and it’s not always with the truth. People panic resulting in injuries and sometimes death. There is really the ability to understand motives and to make rational sense, but that doesn’t prevent people from reacting.
Brock is just one of those secret sociopaths, Sam is just a whiny baby, and the World Circus faction is pretty brilliant in their approach to protecting themselves. This is just three of many people and groups that are portrayed in great detail throughout the book.
Where does this book land on my bookshelf?
I’m happy to put this one on the top shelf. I’d place it right beside Lord of the Flies. This is such a good book, and one that makes you think. When I was finished I had to find an easy read to clean my palette and come down from something that really had my brain going. If you are looking for something a little different and maybe not so traditional, give this a shot. The audiobook includes multiple different narrators that do an excellent job of portraying the different characters and emotions.
Looking for a book with a similar structure. I would also highly recommend Devolution by Max Brooks. Check it out, another book I loved!
Check out my other blog: Educate This and my other reviews at The Bookshelf.