Are you in love now? If yes, then if love were a disease, would you want to be infected? If love were a disease, would you want to be cured? My ultimate question is, to you - you personally - "Do you think love could be a disease in the first place?" These are the questions that kept swirling in my head while reading Delirium by Lauren Oliver.
Love is always a timeless concept used in all forms of art, mostly portrayed in all ways possible to be romantic and even poetic especially in novels. We often have conflicts in loving, but not exactly love itself since love is abstract, a mere concept, it is the loving that we have problems with as it straightaway deals with the issues in the process of loving someone or something.
Delirium deals with love, a head-on confrontation to deny its existence by using scientific ways to curb it, which means love, as a disease, has to be cured so one is rid of the concept "love", feeling to love and be loved. Love should be denied in the first place. End of story. This happens in a dystopian world set in USA where it is divided into mainly two territories, one free of the disease yet ruled in a controlled, totalitarian-like society and the other one, populated by the Invalids who are against the government simply because they want to love. So in this supposed love-free society, the government has made it mandatory for all citizens upon 18 years old to undergo certain medical procedure to be cured of love and at the same time be assigned to a job and a spouse and spend the rest of their lives by playing their role well. Having said that, those below 18 are under the threat of catching the disease. Severe rules are reinforced to ensure that it is a love-less society such as any signs of showing extra love to your children are prohibited, couples who are too loved-up will be arrested and to go through more remedial procedure to get cured. Lena, having a mother who committed suicide due to the disease, has been looking forward to getting cured so she doenst end up like her mother. Yet at the same time, the memory of how her mother showed her love that makes her feel warm and loved contradict her decision sometimes. Lena could have got her cure and become an unfeeling person living a loveless and painless life, only she falls in love with an Invalid, Alex. Her life gets haywire since...
I enjoyed reading this novel a whole lot because it was so beautifully-written, so poetic and it completely took my breath away. Here is one quote, created by the author:
“ ’What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain like a bunch of overeager schoolchildren, about to be released on break. Will you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be deceived?’ –On Beauty and Falsehood, The New Philosophy, by Ellen Dorpshire"
Having said that, it is not a love story per se. I loved reading Lena's memories of her mother and how they spent time together. Little did she know that it is the most natural feeling one has when being with someone you love and care for. As much as she realised later that her mother was very much inflicted with love, the disease, the loving moments they had are embedded in her memory. Imagine, as a child, when you feel upset, the last thing you want to get from your parents would be a nondescript facial expression and unfeeling emotion. It is the love her mother showed her that makes her baffled as to whether love is as deadly as she has been told all the while. It is later revealed to her that the world that she has been living all her life is full of fake lies propagandised by a totalitarian-like government. People have been brainwashed with ideals that are non-humane with emotional detachment. Human being is prohibited to love and be shown with love and if violated, it is a deadly crime.
Such propaganda that aims to bring human being to a loveless and emotionless community is deadly. All the brainwashing to influence human minds itself is dangerous as it tends to standardise human beings as a collective uniform robot, mindless and thus easy to control. Realising this fact just makes me a little more wary of the world I live in, the political views I originally held, the ideals I once believed in and even the media where I get all the information from because we are what we believe in and what believe in is normally what we are educated about.
All in all, it was a great read. I love the concept where it suggests that love is a deadly disease to be cured to assure lifetime happiness and harmony. The concept itself is refreshingly new and original and the story is told from an angle where the female protagonist, Lena battles with her inner self whether to trust her head or her heart and what and who to believe in.
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