Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
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Book Summary Author: Koushun Takami Edition: Paperback Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 2003-02-26 ISBN: 156931778X Number of pages: 624 Publisher: VIZ Media LLC |
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Book Reviews of the Battle Royale
Customer Review: Lord of the Flies my ass OR When Japancraze goes too far
Summary: 1 Stars
I've heard Battle Royale called the "Lord of the Flies of the new generation" -- a whiplash claim that doomed this book from the start. Hardly as poignant as Golding's haunting prose and sense of isolation, the comparison is senseless.In fact, I laugh at this even from the "depiction of the ruthless dog-eat-dog world" view. Back-stabbing and "claw your way to the top" politics aren't very well depicted through a tale of some Japanese kids having to kill each other. That's a quaint idea, but the real reason this is popular is because American teens are obsessed with Japanese cartoons and other violent media, and, here's a shocker, Battle Royale is also a gut-wrenching manga.
Never eloquent (this could be blamed on the translation, which looks as if it were completed by someone with about 6 months of experience with the English language) and hardly affecting because of the characters' inability to express themselves in any way other than immature babbling (reading the word "awesome" three times in a paragraph pains me, even if it is in the thoughts of a school-boy protagonist), Battle Royale is little more than a blood bath, sure to be swallowed up by the pimple-faced, Larry Bird-white basement-dwelling geeks that only America hosts.
It's simply sophomoric to say Battle Royale is allegorical or symbolic, or much more simply, even meaningful. It's not Lord of the Flies. I don't know if it were the thin, single-layered characters, blatant violent descriptions, or the puke-ish vacillating translation that got to me most, but it didn't matter anyway.