The Detainee by Peter Liney (Detainee #01)

The Detainee by Peter Liney
Genre: Science Fiction > Dystopia
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

DESCRIPTION: Peter Liney honed his strong narrative skills and attention to detail during his long career as a writer of German, Australian, British, and South African television and radio programs. In his debut novel, The Detainee, Liney has crated a dystopian world in which the state has gone bust and can no longer support its weakest members.

The Island is a place of hopelessness. The Island is death. And it is to this place that all the elderly and infirm are shipped, the scapegoats for the collapse of society. There’s no escape, not from the punishment satellites that deliver instant judgment for any crime—including escape attempts—and not from the demons that come on foggy nights, when the satellites are all but blind. But when one of the Island’s inhabitants, the aging "Big Guy" Clancy, finds a network of tunnels beneath the waste, there is suddenly hope—for love, for escape, and for the chance to fight back.

REVIEW: Much of this novel I enjoyed. The main storyline intrigued me, despite my usual antipathy toward dystopian themes. It had me hooked and reading well past bedtime straight through to the end.

The trouble was the ending, which came far too suddenly. Until then, I thought I had been reading an intelligent, internally-consistent novel.

The careful pacing of the first two-thirds of the book set up the expectation of a different outcome, one that would not see the protagonists having advanced as far as they did.

It felt to me like another novel could have been written between the conclusion of the pivotal conflict described in Chapter 19 and the conclusion of the book in Chapter 20. Events suddenly seemed hurried and were inconsistent with the earlier pacing and the status quo on and off the island that had been described throughout the book previously.

Rather than an excellent novel, it began to feel like the poorly-scripted, rushed ending of a made-for-TV rendition of such a novel. One of the major sticking points, for example, was the unrealistic, sudden turnabout of children who had been traumatized, brutalized and manipulated over much, and for some of them, all of their lives. Until that point, the novel had been internally consistent and psychologically spot-on.

I understand there will be two more books within the same theme, to form a trilogy... and I hope to read the second book and perhaps the third one. However, given an entire period of events is missing for me, which feels like a betrayal of the characters, my enjoyment of it may be negatively affected.

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