Book Review: Mockingjay

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I've done book reviews of the first two books of the Hunger Games trilogy for the last few weeks, and it's time to wrap it up with Mockingjay, the final book in the bestselling series.  Click on the links to read the previous review of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.  I will attempt to review the third book without giving any spoilers for that book, but I'll be referring to events of the previous two books in this review, so if you haven't read the books yet and hate spoilers, be forewarned.

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Panem's teenage heroine Katniss Everdeen is back again, a damaged soul after not one but two forays into the deadly arena of the Hunger Games.  This time, her defiance of the unwritten rules by which the Capitol keeps its subjects in line has caused a terrible retribution to fall on the citizens of District Twelve, her former home.  President Snow shows a creepy and altogether too personal animosity toward her.  Worst of all, her fellow combatant Peeta, one of the few morally centered characters in the books, has been captured by the Capitol and is presumably being tortured and brainwashed in an attempt to manipulate her.  Because Katniss has come to be the Mockingjay, the symbol of resistance against tyranny that may be the only thing able to motivate and inspire the freedom fighters in this post-apocalyptic world to rise up and overthrow their oppressors.  And it is most definitely a case of either kill or be killed, but on a much larger scale than we've seen previously.

Action centers in District Thirteen, previously thought to be utterly destroyed.  But in reality, an insurgency has been building itself there for several years, and its leaders desperately want Katniss to work for them.  Katniss spends much time fighting the call to be the Mockingjay.  She is very obviously suffering from post-combat psychological disorders, and the forms warfare takes in this distant future setting are not pleasant.  Her new allies are sympathetic, but Katniss is a soldier now and is expected to act like one. There is also the love triangle; Katniss, whether she wants to admit it or not, is torn between Peeta, the boy with the bread who loves her and has shown himself willing to die for her on multiple occasions, and Gale, the spirited hunting partner of her younger years, with whom she unquestionably has more in common.  And the danger: the very real possibility that none of the principal characters might survive the book.  Katniss is, at points in the story, so haunted by grief that she becomes passive.  There are no moral authorities in this book; and there is more than a little of the postmodern idea that all forms of government are equally corrupt.

If you've read my previous two reviews, you know I have mixed feelings about this series.  The anti-war message is all very well, but the first-person, present tense narration tends to make the action feel too close, too immediate.  I think of it as the literary equivalent of a first-person shooter game.  By no means is the violence glorified, but I have to wonder if a better way to create social consciousness and anti-war sentiment in young people might not be to make a few documentaries about real-world senseless violence and play some old Peter, Paul, and Mary albums.  Still, it was the most believable for me of the three books, largely because it focused on the larger world outside the arena.  When I was reading the first book particularly, I was desperate to see the whole world in context; this is where we get that information, and it is satisfying.

The depraved violence makes it a disturbing read for adults and older teens; I personally can't recommend it for younger children.  But it is a haunting story that will stay with you, and the ending is not as utterly bleak as I was afraid of.  Okay, so that's not entirely high praise.  It's a postmodern book.  It will have to do.

Book Review: Catching Fire (Hunger Games 2)

I'm finding that as my student load approaches 50, I'm more and more stressed by the end-of-quarter grading rush.  For some reason it took me all of Thursday, Friday, and most of Saturday to tackle the final exams and reading worksheets, and I'm by no means done with final grades yet.  This translates into zero time to do things that I actually set the blog up to talk about: quilting and knitting.  So no pretty pictures to share, either.  Instead, I've decided to continue my book reviews of the Hunger Games trilogy.

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I’ve already reviewed the first book in the Hunger Games trilogy here.  Today I want to tackle the second, Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins.  I will do my best not to give any spoilers for the 2^nd or 3^rd books in this review, but I will freely refer to events of the 1^st book, so if you have not read it yet you may want to skip this post.

As the second book opens, Katniss Everdeen, the first-person protagonist, has secured a position for herself and co-champion Peeta that is nearly unheard of in the benighted history of District Twelve.  Only once before has a champion emerged from Twelve, and he is Haymitch, the town drunk.  But the shadowy totalitarian rulers at the Capitol, personified by the creepy and all-too-personal President Snow, will not let Katniss and Peeta live in comfortable luxury.  Their victory in last year's games was won by threatening a double-suicide, thereby cheating the public out of their entertainment and somehow posing a threat to the stability of the Capitol.

Katniss and Peeta go on a victory tour and see rumblings of political unrest throughout the districts they tour, as well as the ruthless hand of the government in suppressing any dissent.  They must act as if they are in love, or reprisals will undoubtedly fall on their families and friends.  As champions they are expected to train and advise the next year's champions, but this is a special anniversary year, the 75th since the beginning of the Hunger Games, and it is announced that this year's contestants will be drawn from the winners of previous years.  Think of it as the "all-star" version of your favorite reality show, but to the death.  So the central conflict of this book involves another entry into the arena, forced combat in front of a command audience, and kill-or-be-killed situations.

Now, I freely admit that I am not a major consumer of dystopian or Young Adult fiction, and especially not of the combination of the two genres.  However, I have a fair amount of familiarity with the ancient Romans, and some with the realm of politics, and Catching Fire does not create a completely believable story on either point.  Juvenal's famous quote, "panem et circenses" may have given the Capitol its name and provided inspiration for creating a fascinating fantasy world, but it was in actuality more of an indictment against the Roman people, as you can see in translation:

Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

In other words, you can't be manipulated unless you let yourself be manipulated.  I would have been more patient with the story if the Capitol had been Roman in more than name: but these effete narcissists would have been wiped off the map by real Romans, or even real barbarians.  I found it impossible to believe that the same culture that took such an avid interest in voting on Katniss' wedding gowns would also have the military savvy and stamina to terrorize the populace so absolutely, even to the point of hidden cameras, genetically engineered torture, and mind control.  The Romans may have had their decadent elements, but they were much more straightforward than that, and they respected courage and leadership in any form they saw it.

However, this book did much more than the first in the series to fill in the gaps in the fictional world of Panem that were troubling me.  We understand a little more of the structure of the country and the seething resentment that must inevitably bubble to the surface.  But I am still troubled by the cross-genre nature of the book itself.  It seems counterintuitive to write an anti-war book condemning the over-reliance on popular culture and violent entertainment, while at the same time coopting your readers into the very manipulative, violent entertainment you are ostensibly condemning.  And that's what happens to us -- remember, first-person narrator in the present tense means that we are connected to Katniss' thoughts with an intimacy and immediacy that could be compared to the "teaser" interviews that contestants give in our reality TV programming.  There is no time to think ahead or live in anything more than the moment.  When we do reflect on what we've read, we realize that other than the enforced intimacy, we don't really like Katniss as a heroine.  She's tough and gutsy, yes.  Quick with a snarky comment, she's honest in the midst of an artificial world and you want to like her.  But when the action is thickest, she tends to be rather passive, letting others make the important calls and retreating into her personal angst after just enough decisive action to advance the plot to the next point of crisis.  At the very end of Catching Fire, the final plot revelation/cliffhanger comes so abruptly that it's disorienting... leaving you, of course, with a compelling need to read the third book, whether you like Katniss or not.

It makes for gripping, page-turning reading, suitable for older teens with enough maturity not to be depressed by the heavy theme.  Or younger teens who will be oblivious to the heavy theme and enjoy it as a violent action/thriller.

 

 

Book Review: The Hunger Games

America has fallen.  The powerful and wealthy ruling elite have crafted a new society for their sole benefit, ruthlessly oppressing the majority and imposing a vindictive system of reparations upon those who have opposed them in the past.  These punitive taxes, or "tributes" serve a dual purpose; to prevent the subjugated masses from even the smallest sign of dissent, and to secure the most luxurious and decadent lifestyle possible for the favored few as they run society in the way they please.  Bread and circuses: it worked for the ancient Romans for quite some time, after all.

This is, of course, the scenario of The Hunger Games, the phenomenally best-selling dystopian novel by Suzanne Collins.  I like my writing to have layers, so you may draw your own conclusions about how I feel about the events of the most recent election cycle.  The Hunger Games was my first real foray into the "Young Adult" category of children's literature, and at least in part I felt compelled to read it since it is phenomenally popular among young people I know, and touches on the political intrigue and convoluted history of the ancient Romans.  I don't normally gravitate to edgy or dystopian fiction myself, but this trilogy is deservedly popular, and of course, there is a major motion picture now, making it a book that kids are eager to read and parents are concerned about.  For a review of the series from a Christian perspective, check out this one from Redeemed Reader.  I plan to review the series in three parts, and hope to avoid giving spoilers, although when I get to the 2nd and 3rd books I will have to refer to events of the previous books.

The first thing you are struck by in the opening pages of the novel is the first person narrative, and the second thing is the present tense.  The entire series plays out this way, drawing us into the very mind of heroine Katniss Everdeen with an immediacy that is impossible to deny, rather like the command performance of the Hunger Games where every citizen of Panem is forced to watch children drawn from the twelve districts kill each other for the entertainment of the Capitol.  Once you have read the first few pages, it is almost inevitable that you will be swept along with the story to its conclusion.  It's hard to stop after the first book; there is an insidious power that draws you in, even though Katniss is far from a likeable heroine and the world she inhabits is bleak.

I have heard that most young people do not find the book disturbing but treat it as just a "what if" scenario.  Adults tend to take a harder line against it; and not because of lack of literary merit or author's ability.  In the wake of the Connecticut school shootings especially, a world where children kill children for the entertainment of adults is something we would prefer to keep unthinkable, and my own first reaction was that it would have been better if this book had never been written in the first place.  Some questions should never be asked, and some thoughts should never be entertained, and it may very well be better for most people never to be forced into the mind of someone who must either kill or be killed.  But the book was written, and we who work with young people need to deal with it in an intelligent way.

As Katniss volunteers to take her beloved little sister's place as a tribute from insignificant District 12, we are carried along with her into a different world from the life of deprivation and oppression she has known until now.  She has developed the ability to provide for her family in a meager way by sneaking into the woods to engage in illegal hunting with her best friend, a boy named Gale.  But all that abruptly changes when she and Peeta, the more middle-class son of the town baker, are treated to makeovers by image consultants and stylists to present them along with the other 22 contestants at the gala opening ceremonies.  Plot points unfold at a breathtaking rate; Katniss herself is too caught up in the circumstances to think of the future, but Peeta sets up a gut-wrenching love triangle when he reveals on national TV that he loves her.  But only one person can win the Hunger Games, and it's unlikely to be either one of them.

I assume that Suzanne Collins wrote this postmodern trilogy with the intent to promote an old-fashioned anti-war message, updated for a generation of kids who are comfortable with sharing every thought on social media.  But the very medium she uses, with immersion into the mind of the protagonist who must kill to stay alive, is the literary equivalent of those violent first-person shooter video games that most responsible adults would like to remove from their children's lives.  It's the same senseless bloodbath in an artificial world created only for killing, but with a better vocabulary.  At the end, Katniss has either been forced to kill in self-defense, or killed somewhat accidentally, or killed in mercy, or helplessly witnessed the deaths, of several human beings.  One wonders if this has the same deadening effect on the soul of the reader, who shares Katniss' eyes, as those shooter games.  Granted, Katniss acts with a more or less consistent moral integrity, albeit in a world completely empty of a religious presence of any kind.  But she shows little ability to think over the moral component of her actions, or their future implications beyond the immediate threat.  Perhaps this is meant to illustrate the teenage mind, with its tendency to live only in the present, and its tendency toward narcissism.  That's just the thing, it's hard to tell whether Collins is being moralistic or simply using modern techniques to tell an action-packed story in an amoral setting.  I tend toward the former, but she hides her preachiness very well.  Maybe that's a good thing for this generation.

My own opinion on the book is that you shouldn't encourage your child to read it at all before the age of 15 or so, and then only if you are willing to discuss it with him or her rather extensively.  There are some young people who really shouldn't read it at all... those with depressive or violent tendencies especially.  The theme of suicide is particularly disturbing from my point of view, and (not to give spoilers or anything) its use as a possible game strategy.  I cringed a bit when I saw a 6th grader lending the 3rd volume to a 7th grader a week ago.  Yes, it is possible to read these books thoughtfully.  And those who are not thoughtful enough at this point of their lives to appreciate the questions they raise will certainly remember them vividly when they get older.  Still, I will try to keep my own children away from the Young Adult ghetto of moral ambiguity for awhile yet.