Terms of Enlistment

Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos

I quit at the 24% mark. Not a lot had happened up through that point. The protagonist, Andrew, went through basic training and received his assignment. Prior to enlisting, he lived in a Boston area Public Residence Cluster, which seems to be a futuristic version of the projects. Other than that, it’s just an expository dump of military life in 2108 North America. There is no sense of what actual life is like, what the government is up to, or who the enemy is. There’s just nothing…except things that don’t quite add up.

The first 24% of this book is filled with contradictions. The biggest is that the narrator speaks and thinks like a highly educated person, not someone who grew up in an area where nothingness persists, which is how life in the Public Residence Cluster is described.

Overall, there was no semblance of a story forming by the time I quit. And the voicing is all wrong. The protagonist doesn’t feel like an actual person. I should have quit at eh 4% mark, when I read this: “I spend my final night in PRC Boston-7 reading the last fifty pages of Moby Dick. Tomorrow, I will have to leave the book reader behind. I’ve read the novel a dozen times or more, but I don’t want to leave it unfinished now, forever bookmarked at the spot where the Pequod slips beneath the waves.” Moby Dick? That’s a sign of a bad book.

The final straw, the passage that made me put it down for good was this: “Jackson is an equally tall and thin black girl. She wears interesting tattoos under her eyes, some sort of tribal pattern.” Good day, man.

D