Delirium by Lauren Oliver Hodder and Stoughton, HK$169
It takes only a few pages of Lauren Oliver's second novel, Delirium, to realise that something familiar is going on. This recognition is not unpleasant, disconcerting or even suspicious: it's not plagiarism. Instead, here's a book that presses all the right buttons: it is aimed at young adults, but is slickly, if sincerely designed to please as many readers as possible.
You want romance? Tick. Teen drama? Tick. Dysfunctional families, action and adventure? Tick, tick, tick. A smart dystopian novel about a world in which love has been outlawed? Great big tick.
The feeling of deja vu is appropriate. Oliver's first book, the engaging Before I Fall, draws heavily on that hymn to unoriginality, Groundhog Day. In Oliver's retelling, a young woman, Sam Kingston, relives the day of her death, learning new details about her existence each time, but ending up in the same car crash over and over again.
Delirium borrows from other sources and for different reasons. The story is as old as storytelling itself: two young, star-crossed lovers meet, fall in love and, well, to reveal more would spoil the ending. The central pairing of Lena and Alex are as intensely aware of the obstacles to their love as to that love itself. In this, they resound to echoes of Tristan and Isolde and more explicitly Romeo and Juliet: Oliver slips the play into Lena's hand in much the same way that Stephenie Meyer gave it to Bella Swan in Twilight: New Dawn.
The resemblance to Meyer is obvious, but striking. Like Bella and Edward, Lena and Alex are thwarted not by warring families or rival factions but by a genre. In Twilight, it's horror: the inconvenient fact that Edward Cullen is undead. In Delirium, Lena and Alex are scuppered because they live in George Orwell's 1984. Or perhaps it's Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.