The Just City, by Jo Walton, is such an odd little book, I had a hard time making my mind up about it. It’s fantasy with a smidge of sci-fi and a lot of Greek Mythology, so it has a lot to appeal to me. But the story wandered around so much it was a little disconcerting at times.
In the end I decided I liked it. The writing is very straightforward and easy to read, but the concepts behind it are extremely intellectual. It gives you characters you understand, even if you dislike some of them, and a plot that makes sense, while at the same time introducing you to Plato and a concept that’s fascinated scholars for over two thousand years.
I liked the story, and I felt smarter after reading it. Frustrated sometimes, but smarter.
It’s really hard to sum up The Republic by Plato in a paragraph (check out the wikipedia article, which is also oversimplified, but less so than what I’m about to do) but it’s basically a conversation between Socrates and several others about what would make a perfect city, where everything could be as fair as possible, and everyone could “pursue excellence” and become the best possible person. The end goal is a city ruled by “philosopher-kings,” rulers who are as intelligent, impartial, and powerful as a city like that could make them. It would be a city that could improve the whole world.
(There’s an unabridged edition of The Republic that’s about 500 pages, so it’s a little ridiculous of me to condense it into a couple sentences. But that’s about all I knew before reading this book, so I think that’ll be okay for this review.)
In Walton’s novel, the goddess Athena (Athene in her spelling) has decided to create the city for real, because she’s fascinated by the idea and wants to see how it’d work in the real world. She’s not necessarily set on it succeeding, she’d be just as interested in seeing how it fails.
Her brother, Apollo, wants to participate, but not as a god. He got a hard lesson when Daphne decided she’d rather be a tree than have sex with him. He doesn’t understand, but he’s a surprisingly fair-minded deity, and knows that the best way to understand mortals is to become one for a while. So he arranges to be born as a human boy, sold by his starving parents into slavery, and bought by the guardians that set up the city.
The guardians were chosen from all over the world, from as far back as Socrates’ time all the way up into a future where robots are commonplace. All of them had read The Republic and had (consciously or unconsciously) prayed to Athene to be a part of it, so she pulled them through time to an island and told them they could live out their lifespans there and set up the city. At the moments of their deaths they’d be transported back to the moment they left.
The children, thousands of them all around ten years old, were bought from slavers from mostly the same time period, all from the Mediterranean. They were told to forget their lives before, and that from now on they’d be taught to be the best possible person they could become, that they would one day be the rulers of the city they were creating.
From this point on to the end of the book, it becomes one big series of dialogues. Events happen, but don’t look for huge battles or catastrophes. Every climactic moment is a very personal thing between two or three people at most. What counts is the conversations between people, where they ask each other questions to figure out what’s going on and what they should do, ruling out what’s false and using logic to land on what’s right.
It’s the very definition of the Socratic method, and the fact that Socrates himself is in the book and gleefully participating it makes it more fun than you might think.
Lest you think it’s all dry intellectual stuff, there’s also love, rape, rage, and robots.
Each chapter is alternately written from the viewpoint of one of three people: Maia, a woman brought from around the Victorian era to help create the city; Simmea, a young girl bought as a slave to be raised in the city; and Apollo, called Pytheas in his human form.
What’s disconcerting is the meandering style of the story. It doesn’t drive forward faster and faster towards a climactic moment. It sort of…strolls. Not in an aimless way, more like someone taking their time going from point to point and getting to where they were going, methodically but in no hurry at all.
What the reader gets to watch is how the characters all figure things out. They’re taught one thing but they learn to question everything around them. It’s supposed to be a perfect city with a perfect goal, but it asks the question: how much did Plato actually know about human nature?
I was frustrated by several plot lines that I thought could have been resolved, but that’s only because in a regular novel the people who do something unthinkable will get their just desserts. There’s at least one person I would’ve liked to have been dropped in a volcano, but I have to admit sometimes that’s the way the world works.
The ending is also not what you’d expect from a regular novel. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but not necessarily in an annoying way. I’ve read books where I got to the end and felt I wasn’t given a crucial piece of information, but I was expected to understand it anyway, and it ruined the whole book for me. (Hello, Lexicon, I’m looking at you.)
But the ending to The Just City wasn’t expecting you to know everything. It very explicitly tells you that this is all the information you’re going to get. It’s nice to have everything tied up in a bow with a “and this is how they lived for the rest of their lives until they died” but I think Walton ended the book as soon as she’d said everything about The Republic that she wanted to say.
It makes it tough to recommend the book, because a lot of people are disappointed by that kind of novel. But it’s a sweet, easy-to-understand story, with very complex concepts hidden in between little tales of lust, ticked-off gods, and artificial intelligence. It makes you think, without, I think, having to work too hard at it. That’s a tough trick to pull off, but Walton managed it, enough that I want to give her other books a try too.