DYSTOPIA #6
Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson (AUDIO)

A really good listen and really thought provoking although a bit too much in the spirit of a boy's own adventure, the protagonist Thomas Parry never seems to really get hurt through all the danger and troubles he comes across in this dystopia come picaresque.

Parry is taken from his home in the dead of night at the age of 8 and taken to a school where he is indoctrinated into the new world order.  The UK has been redesignated as four separate kingdoms according to the humour of the individual.

The Red Quarter is for sanguine people, optimistic, outgoing and easily distracted, the Yellow for cholerics, quick to anger, passionate, the Green for melancholics, the thoughful depressives, and the Blue for phlegmatics, flexible easy going natured. 

Parry becomes a true servant of the regime, entering the civil service and being sent to a diplomatic in the blue quarter, but then he goes to a strange nightclub which brings back memories of his past and goes on the run, travelling through the various Quarters and even becoming a White person, a person who fits in no Quarter but travels between them, before finally returning to the Red Quarter a very changed man. 

Thomson shows through Parry's experiences that dividing humours negates the countering effects one humour can have on another, and does not allow for the ultimate aim of the theory of humours, that is, that we should recognise which humour is most dominant in ourselves, that is true, but that a truly balanced or humoured individual is one in which the humours are balanced, and therefore tearing apart the fabric of society cannot be right.