Shift

Written by Hugh Howey, Shift is a pointless sequel to the great Wool, treading the same grounds while trying to explain things that didn’t need to be explained in the first place – and sounding just foolish in the process. With uninteresting characters and lacking momentum going forward, the book is a huge disappointment.

Initially, the plot follows two main characters: Troy and Donald. Troy is by far the most interesting one: he is a shifter, a worker in the silos that exist underground, tasked with taking care of them for a small period of time. When his shift is over, he must go back to cryo freeze and wait for his next shift. Donald, on the other hand, is a politician whose story takes place before the world became uninhabitable, and who is assigned to build some silos in case the worst indeed happens.

What makes Troy the most interesting point of view is that he’s going through a process of awakening: he is starting to realize that his society is a dystopian one. The opening passage of the book brilliantly illustrates that, showing him waking up just to realize he is in some kind of prison: “Troy returned to the living and found himself inside of a tomb. He awoke to a world of confinement, a thick sheet of frosted glass pressed near to his face.”

The character, then, begins to notice all the red flags: he notices how he is not supposed to say certain things, how the real truth is hidden behind official stories – the “allowed truth” – and must not be sought in any way, and how each one of the shifters looks and acts like they are just one more cog in the machine, without individuality and personality: “Here, all he saw was stupor, dozens of communal rooms with movies playing in loops on flat-panel TVs, dozens of unblinking eyes in comfortable chairs. No one was truly awake. No one was truly alive.”

And after awakening there is always rebellion: Troy becomes paranoid, thinking that he’s being watched as he starts to defy the orders given to him – especially the small ones, like taking a special medicine. He wants to find a way out, even though he can’t see one: awakening is usually not the solution, but the start of the process from which one realizes there must be one.

Donald, on the other hand, follows a much simpler and foolish plot. He is at the beginning of his career, and so must follow the commands of the senator who helped him during his campaign, senator Thurman. Thurman can be considered the main villain of the book, not only because he is the one responsible for creating the dystopian societies inside silos, but because he still watches and controls them. He is the mastermind behind everything: the character the reader is supposed to hate and put the blame on. To Donald, he often appears as a menacing figure: when he enters a place the protagonist is in, such is his description: “A shadow fell into the room.”

Donald’s point of view suffers from several problems. First, it shifts the focus from the silos to conspiracy theories about the dangers of nanotechnology: instead of building discussions about what makes a society dystopian, the book indulges in foolish warnings about technology. The thing about post-apocalyptic worlds is that it doesn’t matter how they became that way:  the reason for that generally functions just as a general warning, if that. The point of these worlds is to show how humanity can survive now that everything is destroyed – and what that says about the society we live in.

The more the narrative of Shift tries to explain things the more stupid it becomes. And this is a big problem because Donald’s plot in the second act is still trying to explain how everything became the way they are. To make matters worse, it also tries to explain why people keep rebelling in a dystopian society by trying to pinpoint a single reason for it. Therefore, when that reason is discovered it inevitably sounds arbitrary: after all, societies are not simple constructs that can be reduced to a single thing of any kind.

And we still have to deal with the characters that surround Donald. Senator Thurman is an uninteresting villain, since the more he opens his mouth to explain his motivations – the book is full of this kind of exposition – the less sense he makes. By the end, he looks like a delusional old man who unfortunately happened to have too much power on his hands. And the other only character that is near Donald is Anna, Thurman’s daughter, who has a thing for the protagonist. She falls into the cliché of the manipulative woman who is trying to steal another’s husband and never goes beyond that: she seems to be defined by what she feels for Donald and by his rejection.

Another problem with Donald’s story is repetition. He is trying to understand what makes the silos go rogue and he keeps making the same reflections. Donald is the type of character who doesn’t want to become what he is “meant to be” and every chance he gets he laments about his existence. Donald is a gloomy character that doesn’t offer much to compensate for that. After all, he isn’t even a bright one either, taking a long time to figure out Anna’s obvious intentions. Finally, he keeps rejecting Thurman’s answers to why things are the way they are, repeating the same questions over and over again, while the reader will be like “they just don’t make sense, Donald, get over it.”

Besides Donald and Troy, the book also offers two other points of view. The first one is of a young man named Mission, who finds himself in the middle of an uprising in a silo. Mission’s story offers a bit of tension, chase sequences, and plot twists, but ultimately doesn’t have a purpose: the stories told in Wool were very similar and much better constructed.

The last point of view, of a boy named Jimmy, is the worst one in the whole novel. It comes only in the last act but has no momentum whatsoever. The narrative, for example, keeps describing his cat’s behavior for more than four paragraphs when more important things should have been the focus:

“Other times, Jimmy found him standing in the corner where that man he’d shot all that time ago had wasted away. Shadow liked to sniff the rust stains and touch his tongue to the grating. It was for these freedoms that the hatch remained off”

Jimmy’s plot is one of survival. He is a kid that managed to remain alive when his silo was purged and now must live alone, looking for food and water, and trying to avoid the other few survivors. The pace is slow to reflect the tediousness of his life and nothing of interest happens for a while. Therefore, the narrative of Shift takes a halt precisely when it should be proceeding forward in haste. His point of view is even full of cringy moments and passages (‘I am all alone,’ he said. ‘I am solitude’), and ends up fulfilling the only purpose of being fan service: (spoilers) the “climax” is Jimmy meeting a character of the first book in a scene that had already happened there.

Shift, then, is a dystopian novel that focuses on all the wrong things. Wool told a complete and thought-provoking story, and so its sequel finds some trouble in continuing to be relevant, besides being just very, very boring.

January 05, 2019.