June 4th, 2014
I have figured out what’s wrong with *The Hunger Games*
During my period of reading tonnes of young-adult novels in case I wanted to write one (at press time: probably not), The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins was one of the few I read with pleasure for its own sake, rather than amusement/bafflement/anthropological fascination (the only one to really beat it out was The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Steven Chbosky, which just goes to show that sometimes what is popular is actually popular for a reason). I had put off reading HG for a long time, because I do not usually like sci-fi, or dystopian fiction, or post-apocolyptic fiction, or whatever category you want to put it in. More specifically: I do not like novels where starving children murder each other for basic survival.
I won’t outline the plot in more detail, since everyone in the universe has read it or seen the movie or sat next to someone who couldn’t shut up about it. These books are very VERY popular, and as I mention above, there’s good reason: Collins’s premise is incredibly inventive, which is not to say original–her clever mishmash of mythology and reality television is what makes her concept so stirring, and viscerally felt. Her plotting in the first novel is grimly tight–you can’t stop reading because there’s always something new to be worried about. And there’s nothing wrong with her prose, either–I could always picture every scene, characters and actions perfectly.
And while I applaud the achievement, I still felt pretty squicked by my enjoyment. I kept trying to argue with myself that the book makes clear that the Capitol rulers who pit these kids to the death are *evil* and it’s certainly not as if everything is peaches and cream in “real literature”–it’s not like things work out well for Anna Karenina, and Shakespeare is rife with despotic rulers, plus there’s tonnes of gore in Greek mythology.
That didn’t completely sit, but I let a year go by to forget the worst of my misgivings, and then I got the second of the HG novels, Catching Fire, out of the library. This one is not as good as the first–baggier, duller, too focussed on the silly love-triangle (I’m sorry, I know this pretty much rules me out of reading YA, but I cannot care all that much about whom a 16-year-old kisses or does not kiss) and bizarre things like what clothes people wear and identifying every single person who lives in the town. Seriously, there’s nearly 50 characters in this book, and I’m not sure why. We know them semi-well, get a bit of backstory, start to be interested, then they never come back. Very annoying, and constant.
Collins’s prose is as crystal-clear as ever, but the problem is there are much darker and more complex matters to illuminate. The evil President Snow is a dictator and an oppressor, starving the weaker districts to…exert control? This is where things started to fall apart for me. I tried SO hard to make HG a political parable–for apartheid? The Middle East? The most eerie resonances seemed to be Ukraine–Presidents Snow and Putin have some similarities–but the book was written before all that. And the truth is, the scenario with the Capitol and the Districts does not make a whole lot of sense. What do they get by all this violence other than a very expensive tv show? It’s really a child’s version of political oppression, with no real politics, just bad people and good people.
And that means I couldn’t sell the novels to myself as literature. That doesn’t mean I didn’t stay up late reading the end of Catching Fire (rushed ending and stupid cliffhanger, after 400 pages of babble about how the trees looked–not that I’m bitter). But the novel doesn’t really *do* anything–it doesn’t show us the complexity of political life, or political difference. It doesn’t examine how oppression serves the few, or how power corrupts. The first two HG novels really just comfortably underline what we already know: that good people are good and bad people are bad.
And if we’re not learning, growing, expanding our understanding of the world, then the books are just…entertainment. And there’s nothing wrong with entertainment, of course, many of my favourite books are nothing but–but the Hunger Games books are about the murder of starving children.
And that’s when the hammer dropped.
The Hunger Games becomes itself. The readers become, like the awful citizens of the Capitol, voyeurs of the sadistic torture of tweens and teens (and in the second book, some adults too). Whether it’s The Hunger Games I’m reading, or the Hunger Games that I’m watching on TV, I become complicit by not walking away from the book/screen–by indulging in the prurience of being entertained by others’ suffering. Of course, I don’t *want* anyone to die, but since I know that they must die regardless of my will, why not just wish they would hurry up and get offed already, and hopefully in the most entertaining, not-too-nauseating way. Is that a Capitol-viewer’s thought, or is that my thought?
Now I’m really uncomfortable with myself. I’m also not sure if Collins is a genius artist-saboteur, who created a slew of stupid, shallow entertainment gobblers, and then made her readers become them. Or is it all something a bit more benign and less meta? I can’t figure it out.
I suspect that someone has worked this out more insightfully than I did, and I’d really like to read THAT blog post, but I didn’t know what to Google. Anyone know?
Also, if I believe the theory above, does that mean I can’t read the third and final book in the series? Probably, right? Damn.
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This is really interesting. I read the first book a couple of years ago and found it terrifically boring, and you really have articulated why. My response at the time was this: “The sixth book was The Hunger Games, whose trilogy had kept Stuart as glued to the page all week as I am to books in general. I was happy to have a chance to read it as when we are at home, I have so many books to read that I don’t have the space for books like it. Predictably and disappointingly, however, I wasn’t very interested in it, and mainly skimmed the last two thirds. I kept comparing it to Bilgewater, which is a book about a similarly aged character and so much more interesting in terms of how it’s written. I found The Hunger Games so predictable, with a protagonist who we’re always meant to be on board with, who is obviously always going to win, and I was frustrated by how everything in the book required so much explanation, by how Katniss Everdeen is writing down to us. It’s sort of patronizing. I also don’t understand the YA preoccupation with post-apocalyptic worlds, how discussion of these books with young people is always meant to be issues based rather than about the book itself. It’s so prescribed. So there you go. I didn’t like the book so much, though I know I was approaching it wrong, I am not its intended audience, and I think I’d been spoiled by having read books all week long which were so brilliant.”
June 5th, 2014 at 10:02 pmI found the third book the most political. I’m the minority in that I really liked the third book (many people hated it, I don’t know if I would consider it the best but I did like it). Throughout the first two books, we see Katniss as a reluctant head of a rebellion — the third book takes a more cynical (and to my mind, more realistic) view of her power being only as a symbol, and not as an actual flesh and blood leader. And without giving away any spoilers, motivations and good vs bad become more complicated.
So in that, I felt the third book takes us a bit more into the political arena, and presents a more adult take on the scenario. I found the second book the weakest, just because it felt like a rehash of the first, but with older characters. Anyway, I’d suggest giving the third book a chance. If you didn’t like the first two books, chances are the third won’t blow you away either, but I at least appreciated the turn it took.
June 5th, 2014 at 10:39 pmHi Kerry and Jaclyn–Nice to have some other adult opinions on this series. Kerry, I definitely wasn’t bored by the first book (somewhat by the second) but I did have the uncomfortable feeling you articulate of being manipulated and condescended to. I was also irritated in the second book that Katniss is totally passive–she’s always being saved or helped and takes almost no agency, let alone leadership.
Jaclyn, I am intrigued to read the third book because I do want to see how something as complex as political rebellion could be represented in a YA novel. It is hard to make an easy fiction-bite out of a genuine change of government. It goes on too long and has too many repercussions (see: Arab Spring). Still, I’m scared that the temptation of simplistic ending–Katniss becomes president or something equally moronic–will overcome Collins. Also, I may at this point be simply unwilling to read another dozen grisly murders included as plot devices. But my curiosity will probably get the better of me eventually, so I’m glad you did enjoy the third one–that’s hopeful news!
June 8th, 2014 at 10:13 pmLeave a Reply