The Office of Mercy by Ariel Djanikian

Published by Viking on February 21, 2013 

Although the protagonist of The Office of Mercy is twenty-four, the writing style, themes, and plot are characteristic of Young Adult fiction. That's neither good nor bad, in my view, but it surprised me since the novel doesn't seem to be marketed as YA. (In that regard, the promotional comparisons to Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro are unwarranted, although Suzanne Collins is more apt.)

Natasha Wiley works for the Office of Mercy, stationed in a wing attached to the Dome atop the underground settlement known as America-Five. The settlement is dedicated to "World Peace, Eternal Life, and All Suffering Ended," at least for those residing within its walls. Outside the utopian settlement live the (supposedly) starving and disease-ridden Tribespeople. Natasha's job is to monitor the nomadic Tribespeople who come within fifty miles of America-Five, using an array of cameras and sensors. Killing them (preferably with missile strikes) is the work of her colleagues in the Office of Mercy.

The Alphas, the generation that orchestrated the Storm (a genocidal extermination of nearly everyone not living underground), have the status of gods within the settlement. Why and how the Storm happened, and how the Alphas managed to convert underground bunkers into settlements, are largely unanswered questions, despite a cursory discussion of a failed past that seems to have been based on Marxism. In any event, Natasha is part of generation Epsilon; Jeffrey, her immediate supervisor (and romantic interest), is a Gamma. For reasons that are never adequately explained, new generations are grown on a schedule created by the Office of Reproduction. Cell replacement has all but conquered death while other technological advances assure an ample food supply for the settlement's inhabitants.

Like the other underground settlements, America-Five is governed by the Ethical Code, a book that has supplanted the Bible. Over the course of the novel, without the expository information dump that is prevalent in dystopian fiction, we learn how people like Natasha have been trained to think: their disdain for nature's beauty, their need to guard against empathy, their belief that those who live outside the Dome are not people but animals enduring hollow lives of suffering. As is common in dystopian novels, those who stray from correct thoughts are subjected to coercive "reeducation."

The novel's initial phases seem to set it on a predictable path, as Natasha struggles to cope with her hidden and forbidden doubts about the Ethical Code, particularly its insistence that, for the Tribespeople, death is better than pain. Like the plot, Natasha's immaturity, her insecurity about her abilities and her anxiety about whether Jeffrey reciprocates her romantic feelings, reminded me of YA fiction. Natasha's starry-eyed approach to Jeffrey is more indicative of a fourteen-year-old girl than a twenty-four-year old woman.

Midway through the book, a contrived plot twist that forces Natasha to redefine herself while forcing the reader to sympathize with Jeffrey left me rolling my eyes. Natasha's naiveté when dealing with the Tribespeople is flabbergasting. When the story reached a climactic moment that inexplicably shocks Natasha, I was muttering, "Well, what did you think was going to happen?"

Only the final chapter saves The Office of Mercy from mediocrity and predictability. For much of the novel, I thought the story would be about Natasha's moral growth, the story of a young woman in an insular society learning to think for herself. She seemed to be learning simplistic lessons like "killing the innocent is bad" and "empathy is good." In an unexpected twist, the story turns out to be something quite different. If The Office of Mercy is meant to teach a lesson -- and I think it is -- the teacher isn't Natasha at all, and the lesson is refreshingly ambiguous. I'm not sure every reader will appreciate the bleakness and uncertainty of the novel's last chapter, but I admired Ariel Djanikian's courage in telling a dystopian tale that has a dystopian ending. Perhaps that's why the novel isn't classified as YA when everything else about it, from the unchallenging writing style to the relatively unsophisticated characters, screams YA. In the end, I would recommend this to young adults (and, with some reservations, to older readers as well) just for its unconventional take on dystopian fiction.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS