Your next voted book for LTM to critique is The Ruins by Scott Smith. I was unaware that this had come out nearly twenty years ago when I picked it up at Barnes & Noble. I was staring at the monolith that is Stephen King’s section (labeled Horror for some reason…) and tucked underneath Stephen’s books was this one. I pulled The Ruins and another book off the shelf and made my kids choose which one to buy. They picked this…and you picked this one, too. So a few weeks ago I sat down and read The Ruins. Let’s discuss.
Summary
The entire novel is one long text. No chapters or parts. But there are POV shifts with line breaks that Scott uses to identify which POV character is the current agent of interest in the story. Two young American couples are on a vacation to Cancun. While there, they meet a German traveler who came to Mexico with his brother. His brother ran off with some archeologists to a bunch of ruins and left behind a map. The German asks the Americans if they would be willing to help him find his brother. They agree and head off to search for the German’s brother with a Greek traveler who doesn’t speak either English or German. The Greek is along for the ride but he leaves a map behind to tell his buddies where to find him.
The group stumbles into a village of Mayans which means they went too far according to the map Mathias (the German) has. They can’t communicate with the Mayans anyway so they head back looking for the ruins. They notice a set of large leaves blocking a path at the edge of an open field just before the Mayan village. They follow it and find a hill not covered in a jungle like the surrounding forest but covered in red flowering vines. This is the place Mathias’s brother’s map indicates as the ruins; Mathias can even see a tent up on the hill.
The Mayans come storming up the path and try to dissuade the group from going toward the hill, but after Amy (one of the Americans) steps into the vines, the Mayans force all of them onto the hill with visual threats of death. The entire Mayan village surrounds the hill and sets to work keeping the group captive.
Stuck on this hill, each member of the group handles the stress of survival differently. After the Greek falls down a shaft at the top of the hill and breaks his back, the book asks us to consider ever more challenging ethical questions. What kind of person does it take to survive? And can any of them escape this hill alive?
Scoring
Character – ⭐⭐⭐
If you look around on the internet and read reviews on Goodreads and other places, many people are claiming the characters are flat. They read as stereotypes without much character development. This sentiment I can understand. I did find the characters to be rather one-dimensional. However, I don’t know if the book should lose Character points given what I think Scott is trying to do. If you take the end of the book and the beginning of the book as a kind of cyclical bookend to the story, then these characters might represent archetypes found in survivalist literature. The exploration of how these archetypes interact is the interesting part, not necessarily the characters themselves. As a result, we don’t delve too deeply into the characters to keep them as abstractions. In a way, it allows us to superimpose ourselves into one of the characters that match our style the best and see the foibles that our selected archetype would have.
I also think that by keeping the character development slightly muted Scott is making a statement on the difficulty of trying to survive with strangers. Just as the German and the Greek don’t know these Americans that well, neither do we. We are invited to play an invisible role in the group as “witnesses”. This may not be the case, but I do think it can work that way.
So how far do I think Scott intended to go with character development? Well, there are times when we get background information relevant to Stacy and Amy that suggests he wants to build the characters up. But not all people have deep complex emotions driving their actions. A shallow person here and there is sometimes fine. There is room to improve, so I am giving it 3 stars.
Setting – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
This is well done to my standards. Yes, the book is almost entirely set on the hill. But I can picture it very well. The environment feels complete with sounds, sights, textures, and smells. The setting might not be expansive, but I believe it is well done. Full Marks here.
Let me address the topic of the world-building we don’t get. We don’t know where the plant comes from. We don’t know with certainty that the plant spreads by spore. There are a lot of things we don’t know about the situation, but I think this is okay. Like the characters, we are lost in a world we don’t understand either. Just like the characters, we have to make assumptions about the history of the place to try and understand how they got stranded. It again invites us to see the world like a stranger in a foreign land where many things are unexplained.
Plot – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
This is also a place many other people ding Scott. They think someone should have been able to escape. I disagree. I think it works better with the ending it has. The ending they want is the movie ending, but that doesn’t feel as “right”. I think from a plot standpoint the first twenty pages are bland, but once we get to the taxi ride out to the ruins the ball is turning and I wanted to just keep reading to see what happened next. I will concede that if you are expecting something faster moving this isn’t going to do that for you. It is slow and torturous, but that feels like the point to me.
Form – ⭐⭐⭐
Nothing special with the form. It is one long story with POV shifts, but many stories have done this. It doesn’t fail at the form though, so full marks.
Quality – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The quality is good. I don’t get tripped up on the technical aspect of the writing. Scott Smith also has great control over the pacing of this novel. He uses dialog sparingly to draw out the action and slow it down at times. And when he wants the action to progress faster he adds dialogue and shorter paragraphs. Full marks.
Enjoyment – ⭐⭐⭐⭐x 2
If you sang any songs from The Little Shop of Horrors in your head at all, I understand. So many times I felt like I could hear the vines saying, “Feed me!” It was amusing, but I am not sure this was what Scott would have wanted.
At every point in the book, the actions and events make sense at the time. I am pulled forward by a curiosity that Scott creates early in the book.
The early part of the book feels like a slog though. The pacing is slow due to very sparse amounts of dialogue. It is hard to know just how much is in and out of scene in the first twenty pages. I feel like the beginning made it hard to start reading the book and as a result, it could be done better.
All of that combined makes me want to give it three and a half stars, but since I am using whole numbers I am going to edge it up slightly to four.
Conclusion & Video
The Ruins is a good “romp” as my mother would say. It is fun and engaging but it isn’t perfect. I love the idea and the feel of the novel, yet it is hard to get going until we pass the first twenty pages or so. With a composite score of 28 stars, it is safe from Voidy. The takeaway lesson is this, “Don’t follow a stranger into the Yucatan jungle or you might wind up eaten by a plant.”
Voidy, there ain’t no snack here.
