book review: Docile by K.M. Szpara
File this under books that I devoured but didn't love 🤔
One of the more sophisticated ideas explored in Docile is that you don't need to take a drug to alter your personality, that trauma can dramatically change who we are.
True. The problem is, the author fails to establish who Elisha is before he undergoes this transformation.
Besides being angry and poor, there was little that defined him. We were supposed to mourn the loss of his identity but he never really had one in the first place. Pre and post-Alex Elisha often bled together into one.
I had a hard time suspending my disbelief when Alex was told by the board of Bishop Laboratories that he needed to get a companion for PR reasons otherwise his position in the company would be in jeopardy. That's not how corporations work. And the novel’s central conceit is flawed by design because as Elisha becomes Alex's Docile he loses all agency and is completely passive. It's impossible to root for a protagonist who can't make choices and shape his own reality.
If Elisha is a caricature of a poor boy, Alex is a caricature of a rich boy. While he was doing morally questionable things, there was so little specificity to his character I couldn't hate him. He wasn't interesting enough to hate. And as he begins to fall in love with Elisha and realize that what he's done to him is wrong, the shift doesn't have much impact on the reader because he wasn't a fully-formed character to begin with.
Even the secondary characters like Mariah and Lex were cardboard cutouts of bad guys, and Abigail, a hollow symbol of noble suffering.
Elisha's father bothered me the most. His angry reaction to the change in his son seemed contrived, as though the author needed Elisha to have an obstacle at home. I didn't understand why he was so unsympathetic when his son sacrificed so much to save him and his family. He let his wife become a Docile and he would have sent his 13-year-old daughter to the ODR if Elisha hadn't stepped up. It made zero sense.
I thought the darker side of Elisha and Alex's relationship was interesting but it veered too far into the erotica camp for my taste. I have nothing against the slavefic trope but in the last third of the book the author mounts a huge moral case against it, so I don't know why those earlier scenes read like straightforward erotica, undermining the book's own message. The author was titillating his readers with graphic sex in one scene and then virtue signalling in the next, like he was trying to have his cake and eat it too.
I think the strongest scene was the one with Alex's ex-boyfriend, Javier, punishing Elisha, and the scene that follows where Alex finds out and is horrified. There was some psychological realism in these moments and smart choices, like Elisha using his safeword for the first time when he's in emotional (rather than physical) distress. "Midnight!" Yes, I cried.
Toward the end, the book starts to explore the topic of consent in earnest. A lot of these moments, like the deposition and the trial, are heavy-handed but I did enjoy seeing Elisha and Alex renegotiate their relationship and figure out if they ever really loved each other and whether they have a future together.
There were some really sweet and funny moments too, like when Elisha is trying to prove to Alex that he can think for himself and locks the car door. "I lock doors now."
I almost wish the author had abandoned the erotica and courtroom drama and explored his ideas through a character-driven story about Alex and Elisha's relationship.
Though I had issues with Docile, ultimately I did enjoy the experience of reading this book and would recommend it if you're interested in a light dystopian read that poses some interesting questions about consent and love.
