REVISIONS: THE HUNGER GAMES

This is a revised post from my old blog.  The original post can be found here.

Abstract: Popcorn fiction with a philosophic glaze.  Pacing starts out horrible but improves, and the main conflict and the world are easy to invest in.  Katniss is frustrating, however, and the prose is more like watching a movie than reading a book.  Overall, it’s a fun, and eventually exciting book, though not deserving the level of praise it received.

Content Warning (highlight to view): violent imagery, swearing, alcohol, disturbing descriptions

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I had planned this week to do a new book review, but I fell behind due to some things, so here we’ve got a return to my old not-friend: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Like most, I sped through this novel when I read it some years back.  The pacing is fantastic for most of this book (more on that later), and the concept is eternally intriguing.  Dystopia is the genre of our disenchanted age.  It is the genre of fascism, socialist “utopias,” and WWI-style no-man’s lands.  It is an examination of humanity’s corrupt nature in relation to power, whether as the core of the story or as the source of the setting or both.

The Hunger Games takes place in one of those “both” worlds, where pursuit of power destroyed much, leading to a fascist, class-based society where the people of America are divided into “districts.”  Each district has a specific role to play in supporting the lavish lifestyle of the Capital, whether they want it or not, and violent force keeps the people within their prescribed boundaries.  There are some who rebelled, but they were defeated.  In order to quell future uprisings, the Capital instituted the titular Hunger Games: an annual battle royal where two children aged 12-18 from each of the other districts kill each other until only one remains.  When her younger sister is chosen for the Games, our protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, volunteers as a substitute.  Now, Katniss needs to win the games if she ever wants to return home alive.

The battle royal is a simple but attractive concept.  It has natural tension, a clear goal, and it’s often appealing to see how an author will structure the royal for his or her specific world.  Collins does a good job here.  The set up and preliminaries are interesting and tense, and the Games themselves are a blood-pumping action movie put to paper.  Furthermore, by making her contestants children, or at least young adults, she establishes immediate emotional investment while revealing the terrible nature of this life-or-death “game” reveled in by the dystopian Capital.  It does get pretty graphic, too, when describing some of the terrible things that happen to these young people that are then celebrated by the “social elite,” so this wouldn’t be a book I recommend to younger readers without parental approval.

In addition to executing on her concept well, Collins makes excellent use of cliff-hanger chapter endings to keep the reader going.  For most of the book, Collins knows what scenes to put into the chapter, what to leave unresolved, and where to end so that the reader feels compelled to read “just one more chapter.”  Her simple prose style also helps, as there is an ease to reading that a more deliberate or flowery style might have inhibited.  Once I got going, I finished the book in about two days due to the high-tension narrative and strong pacing.

Getting to that point, though, was hard.  I put the book down at first because the pacing and structure in the first few chapters is horrendous.  Collins also clumsily tries to cram too much backstory into those first 2-3 chapters.  I also struggled to become emotionally invested in the characters.  For instance, while I understand the logic of Katniss sacrificing herself for her sister, Prim, I didn’t feel it, despite being an older sister myself.  I’m not Katniss.  I don’t care about her family, so the author needs to make me care.  But Katniss’s mother pretty much just exists to make Katniss seem resourceful, and the most we get about Prim is that she is sweet, likes animals, and everyone loves her because she is just a wonderful person while very few people like Katniss.  I’m supposed to care about this family?  I’m supposed to care that Katniss is sacrificing herself for them?  I care much more about the father-daughter dynamic of the original “Beauty and the Beast,” with its simple but powerful establishment of love and care given in just a few paragraphs than I did with chapters on the Everdeen family, and when that familial connection is supposed to be the driving force in a character’s decision, having that emotional pull is important.

Between the horrid pacing, poorly done backstory dumping, lack of emotional tension, and failed character building, I just about abandoned the story.  Honestly, I only picked it back up because one of my sisters enjoyed it.

Well, once I did pick up the series again, I found myself pleasantly surprised when the pacing righted itself soon after.  I did trip over the 1st person-present tense style quite a few times, though.  The most frequent argument I’ve heard in favor of using 1st person-present tense is ambiguity for if the narrator will live, but I’ve read 1st person-past tense stories where the narrator dies at the end, so I know it’s possible and that it can even be done well, so that argument doesn’t hold much sway for me.  Instead, it’s simply a distraction for me, interruptions written into the work.

Also, while the simplicity of the prose helps with the pacing, there was a feeling like I wasn’t reading a book but watching a movie.  I greatly dislike movie-style writing.  They are different art forms, books and movies, and to utilize the strengths of movies often diminishes the imaginative power and potential for books by removing the important role of the reader in imaginatively filling out the world.  It makes them, the book and the reader, lesser.

My last major issue is with Katniss herself.  I don’t like her.  I simply don’t.  I was annoyed with her from the beginning of the book, and I didn’t like her by the end.  It doesn’t take much to establish a likable trait for a character.  To use the before mentioned “Beauty and the Beast” as an example, Beauty, when asked what she wants her father to bring back for her, asks only for his safe return and a single rose, establishing herself as someone who cares more for her father and natural beauty than for the riches her sisters desire.  Humility, care, and love of natural beauty are positive traits that help establish the protagonist as someone to support.  What I remember most about Katniss is “People don’t like me, I’m not an especially likable person, and I’m not charismatic.  Oh, but everyone loves Prim!”  That’s not much to go on.  And, yes, I know she’s supposed to be resourceful and intelligent, but her recklessness and, frankly, stupidity and lack of awareness and understanding at certain parts of the story really don’t convince me on that front.  By midway through the story, I actually would have preferred Katniss die than certain other characters.  I’m not even going to go into the romance element.  In some ways, it’s not terrible, but it does tick me off to think about.  I don’t want to go there.

It’s hard for me to talk about this book.  I didn’t dislike reading it, but the elements of it I do dislike, I dislike very much.  The Hunger Games blasted onto the cultural scene and helped reinvigorate the dystopian genre and brought a greater sense of legitimacy to the YA book demographic, much as Harry Potter and the works of C. S. Lewis and Tolkien did for children’s literature.  It’s an important work.  And it’s very, very popular, even today.  But that’s what makes it so frustrating.  It’s a fun popcorn book, and it does have some social commentary and some strengths worth examining, but it’s not a great book.  It deserves praise, but not the level of praise it gets.  To see an “okay” work elevated to such a high place speaks to me of a potentially deeper issue in our culture than even this dystopian sci-fi seems to realize: the worship of mediocrity.