Arch-Conspirator

Product Information

Passing into the Archive should be cause for celebration, but Antigone’s parents were murdered, leaving her father’s throne vacant. As her militant uncle Kreon rises to claim it, all Antigone feels is rage. When he welcomes her and her siblings into his mansion, Antigone sees it for what it really is: a gilded cage, where she is a captive as well as a guest. Roth's performance is intelligent but less emotive: set in a future dystopian world, this makes use of Creon's one-note politics and takes up questions of female bodily autonomy. I especially like the way this re-writes the previous transgression of Oedipus and Jocasta: here they refuse to have 'designer' babies by gene splicing and editing so their crime is not incest but natural conception, tainting their children in a world where the naturally-born are labelled 'soulless'.

Arch-Conspirator - Macmillan Arch-Conspirator - Macmillan

The primary issue with Arch-Conspirator is that, while having inventive fun with the original tale, it seems like it is trying to do too much at once instead of exploring one theme really well. I love a retelling that really throws you for a loop, but I feel a total resetting of time and place to use the narrative as a modern political commentary was done much more effectively in Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, which dealt with immigration and the Iraq war. I quite liked that we get to see conflicting opinions and perspectives that self-justify actions, though in Home Fire we spend much more time in these perspectives that allow them to be nuanced instead of such broad strokes as we have here. The world-building elements and the way the book ended were great! In fact, I just wish the book was longer and more fleshed out because there was so much more Roth could have done with this world. I get that it's supposed to mirror the play which is pretty short, but it could have been a richer story IMO if this would have been a novel.

Review

I was on a balcony, nestled in ivy that grew only here, in the High Commander’s courtyard, where no amount of water scarcity in other parts of the city could convince Kreon to sacrifice beauty. People will permit a High Commander his small indulgences, I had heard him say once. It is such a difficult job. In this dystopian reimagining of the tale, humanity has reached the brink of its own end. The planet is mostly uninhabitable. There’s one city left; outside it is the wilderness. All goods are scarce, buildings are decaying, and blowing dust covers everything. The only hope for humanity’s future is the Archive, where genetic material taken from people after death is stored. A quasi-religious value is attached to these Archives — the stored samples represent immortality for the dead, a way of saving and then resurrecting their souls. In Arch-Conspirator, Veronica Roth retells the story of Antigone, now set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic city that’s filled with the last remnants of humanity. These people now survive through gene editing and are under the strict rule of Kreon, Antigone’s uncle. But when Antigone’s brother tries to stand up to Kreon’s leadership and is killed, Antigone must make a choice about how she will choose to live her own life, and how she will honor those who came before her. If you’ve read or seen the play, you’ll know to expect that the rebellion fomented by Antigone’s brother Polyneikes does not go well, and that it ends with him and her other brother, Eteocles, dead at each other’s hands. In Roth’s novella, Antigone’s uncle—Jocasta’s brother—Kreon decrees that Polyneikes’s ichor is not to be extracted, but permits their sister Ismene to extract Eteocles’s. Antigone, unbowed by her uncle and his threats, determines that she will extract Polyneikes’s ichor in defiance of Kreon, because she promised Polyneikes that she would do so—even though she does not believe in or want the immortality of the soul promised by the Archive. She enlists the help of Haemon, Kreon’s son and her betrothed, when he more or less volunteers himself, even though she has (ironically) distrusted him from the beginning due to his parentage. And, though there are some minor deviations from the path of destiny that is laid beneath her feet by Kreon’s inflexibility, the tagline on the novella’s cover—“Doomed from the start. All of us.”—is essentially accurate. It is a tragedy, after all.

Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth: Book Review Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth: Book Review

Speaking of Kreon, I think it was interesting that Roth changed him from being Jocasta’s brother to being Oedipus’. Honestly, it kind of makes sense—being Oedipus’ brother makes a more direct foil between those two, and Antigone’s relationship with her brother. It was kind of clever, and I can’t complain. The setting is the distant future. We are on Earth, but the planet has become a wasteland. To preserve what’s left of humanity, the genetic material of those who die are extracted and stored away in a repository called the Archive. Every person still living is a gift, every viable womb precious, but women no longer have children naturally. Instead, most choose to procreate by selecting desirable traits for their offspring from the Archive, with those who were conceived the natural way shunned for being soulless.Antigone’s parents—Oedipus and Jocasta—are dead. Passing into the Archive should be cause for celebration, but with her militant uncle Kreon rising to claim her father’s vacant throne, all Antigone feels is rage. I ended up really enjoying reading this book, and it's been great to see that I still enjoy Roth's writing, even if we've both grown a lot since Divergent. It was interesting to see her blend this sci-fi setting of a broken world with Antigone, and I really liked how it ended up working together. I hadn't been too familiar with Antigone before reading this, but after reading a summary after finishing this novella, I only appreciated how Roth used the source material even more. Arch-Conspirator is a gut punch of a story. Roth takes everything fragile about love, everything powerful about certain doom, and blooms with it. You'll be holding your breath until the very last word." - Olivie Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six

Veronica Roth Bio - Veronica Roth

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own. This slim novella is tautly written an I think the entire concept of this story was pretty brilliant, transplanting the ancient Greek world and characters to this futuristic city that’s barely scraping by. Considering how much of Antigone’s story is influenced by her parentage, it makes sense to have genetics a major factor in this version, and I think it was done well. Some of the details about how reproduction works here seemed a little murky, but it didn’t affect my comprehension of the overall story. The ending of the story, though likely not a spoiler (this is an ancient Greek tragedy, after all), feels somewhat disappointing. After getting to know Antigone, you wish for a different ending for her. But the rather hollow victory that Kreon has, also laced with sorrow and pain, lends a decent amount of complexity to the situation. It’s not that the villain wins, it’s that no one really does. But at the same time, if you look at it a certain way, Antigone wins.Oedipus and Jocasta are in the Archive. He was a politician and she was a scientist so brilliant that she could not be denied even though women cannot be scientists. They died in a riot not long after Oedipus won the only election in the city’s history; whether that riot is connected to their crime of conceiving their four children naturally is never made clear. But their actions are infamous, and so Antigone and her three siblings are at best tolerated rather than beloved in the city and in Kreon’s household. Arch-Conspirator is the latest release from Veronica Roth. This novella blends heavy science fiction dystopia – think reproductive control and consciousness – with Greek mythology. It reminds me of like Altered Carbon and Greek figures and The Handmaids Tale. And I think that might be one of my issues, Roth bites off a lot in Arch-Conspirator. While I think that some of those topics work well together, by the end of this novella, I was left with more questions than answers. Outside the last city on Earth, the planet is a wasteland. Without the Archive, where the genes of the dead are stored, humanity will end. Perhaps it wasn’t because we were family—perhaps it was because we were children of Oedipus, warped though we were by our genes. And Oedipus had almost started a revolution—he was a symbol, and so were we. And what better way to take the power from a symbol than to claim it as your own? A retelling of Antigone was not what I was expecting to see as the latest book by Veronica Roth, but this science fiction reimagining of the Grecian tragedy is fantastic!