The Hunger Games Trilogy
Nov. 2nd, 2010 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipperxI don't know what it was about the timing of reading these books, but it seemed that I always finished them late at night when all I could post was "Wow!" or "That was harrowing... and now I'm bleary-eyed and exhausted and need to go to bed." I never got around to the more thinky-thoughts.
I also understand why Lionsgate optioned the movie rights. It could be quite cinematic with big action sequences and a soap opera romantic triangle playing out for the Twilight crowd (though it seems horribly unfair to compare HG's relationship entanglements to Twilight. The HG characters are in no way frivolous. They have no time to be. There are no purple prose odes to sparkling abs.) Still, it would be easy for a movie studio to make it handsome alpha male versus artistic beta guy, and they would not be wrong. It's just that somewhere along the way it struck me that Gale and Peeta, while characters in their own right, also represent aspects of the heroine, Katniss. Gale is the hunter, the guy that rages--with reason--against the State and fights back. Peeta, the baker's son, is the guy who would offer bread to a starving girl, even knowing that he'll be punished for it (much as Katniss willingly sacrifices herself for her sister, taking Prim's place in the Games, knowing that it's a death sentence). He has empathy and compassion. Peeta won me as a reader when, before they were forced into the arena, he told Katniss:
(Oh, Peeta...)
I was struck by one character's comment that Katniss would "choose the one she can't survive without." Living in such dire circumstances, Katniss interpreted that statement as her being thought of as a user, as an assumption that she would 'choose' what she could best exploit. As a reader I took it as meaning that it would come down to what part of herself could she not survive without -- the hunter or the baker (her inner warrior or her humanity.) The tension is not just a question of Pretty Boy A or Lovely Boy B, but who this harrowing journey will force Katniss to become before it's over. What parts of herself will she damage and lose, and what will she need in the end in order to survive.
The dystopian world where these characters live, fight and die is interesting enough to be worth thinking about in its own right (As are some of the secondary characters. I love Finnick Odair, Johanna Mason, and Haymitch as much as the primary characters. As previous year's Games victors, they illustrate how losing the Games may cost your life, but 'winning' can shred your soul. I also notice that, going by the previous victors, wits must trump brawn most of the time and there isn't a particular gender favor. There seem to be at least as many, if not more, female Games veterans as there are male.)
Anyway, the country of Panem rose out of the wreckage of what had once been the United States. Actually, what it says is "North America" so sorry, Canada and Mexico. I think you're toast too. There's no mention of the world outside of Panem's fascist borders, though the Capitol has absolute control over the flow of information, so I assume that the rest of the world is there. However there are hints of worldwide catastrophe (mentions of rising ocean levels, drowned cities, pandemics, and concerns about population size in relation to adequate genetic diversity.) Whatever happened, however, was far enough in the past that there is no living memory of it, nor any sense of restoring what was lost.
There's an interview with the author on YouTube where she mentions influences such as 1984 and The Lord of the Flies. And you can certainly see bits of their DNA in Panem and The Arena (the Olympic venue of Panem's annual gladiatorial games). In a written interview, Collins mentions the myth of Theseus, the Minotaur, and the Labyrinth of Crete where, after defeating Athens, King Minos's terms for surrender was that every year Athens had to send seven boys and seven girls to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur. Easy enough to see that influence in this story as well. Oh, and...
I see what you did there, Suzanne Collins. And did before late in the story a character decides to explain (which annoyed me a little, but then I reminded myself that this is a young adult series and so, perhaps, explanation along the way isn't a bad thing.)
Panem was originally formed as the (rather parasitic) Capitol and its thirteen enslaved districts that produce the food and goods that the Capitol consumes with uncaring fecklessness. (The Capitol has a gleaming city of extravagant entertainments where the populace is obsessed with the whims of fashion [Fur-lined underwear! Cat's eyes! Gold tattos! These people... they turn themselves into garish circus freaks] with food in excess and advanced medicine (especially in the form of plastic surgery) whereas the Districts live in fenced cities, heat their homes with coal fires, have only intermittent electricity, virtually non-existent health care [thus depending on herbal recipes and apothacaries], and then there's the unceasing hunger... always under the watchful eye of the Capitol's 'Peacekeeper' military forces). [And if a Capitol citizen develops a conscience and tries to speak out... their tongues are cut out and they too are enslaved as an 'Avox.']
Some seventy-five plus years prior to opening of the novel, there was a District uprising sparked by District 13. The Capitol responded by erasing District 13 out of existence...while reminding citizens constantly of its destruction. (Propaganda is omnipresent in these books, part of the layers of "Real or not real?" that pops up again and again. How much of 'reality television' is real? How much of the news (especially when it's treated the same way)? How much of what we do is playing a role for someone else and to meet expectations? How do you make such important distinctions when vital information is witheld? And how confused are you when the lines become so blurred between real and spectacle, politics and television, relationships and role play?) In memory of the failed uprising, the Capitol demands that each year, every remaining district select by lottery one boy and one girl to be sent to the Capitol, where they will be sent into The Arena (which is the Olympics meets Survivor... in hell). It's televised for the jaded Capitol citizen's amusement and broadcast to the Districts for required viewing (oh yes, the electricity works then) so that the Districts absorb the Capitol's message: We can take your children, slaughter them, make you watch, and there's nothing that you can do about it. All without fatally depleting an already precariously undersized population.
Um... yeah. Did I mention that this book series is dark?
Book 1 starts on the day of the "Reaping", the day of the lottery that selects the names for District 12's Tributes to compete in the seventy-fourth Hunger Games. When Katniss Everdeen's sister's name is drawn, Katniss throws herself on the stage, volunteering to go in her sister's place. The second name is Peeta Mellark, the boy who had given Katniss bread when her family had been starving to death after her father had died in the mines...
The Hunger Games
I think this is probably the best paced of the books. It cuts to the heart of the matter pretty darn fast. The reaping happens immediately and it's off to the Capitol.
And there's the first construction of the "real or not real?" confusion that takes place throughout all three books. To me, one of the most frustrating aspects (frustrating as opposed to the downright horrific aspects) is the American Idol/Dancing with the Stars part of it where the tribute is supposed to try to win the favor of the audience. It's appalling enough to be sent to one's death, worse to not even be able to show your contempt for the people that send you there. It's like reading those historical speeches Henry the VIII's victims made where they went to their death praising the king who sent them there. It's adding insult to injury. And yet Katniss is forced to ignore her own nature and try, because she promised her sister that she would try to survive.
Where I knew that I was 'all in' with the story was Rue. God. When I suddenly gulped and started crying as I realized what had happened to Rue, that was it. The writer had me. Katniss singing Rue into sleep/death was heartwrenching and made me love Katniss. For all that Katniss thinks of herself as being ruthless, time and time again she shows that there is something good at her core. Rue's death was haunting, which is why it works when it's invoked later, both when Katniss is confronted -- and spared -- by Thresh, and when the memory Rue is used in Book II.
Also the romance/non-romance stuff works for me here. The confusion of it works. Peeta and Katniss are playing out a storyline for the audience, one that might possibly work and convince the audience that they're starcrossed lovers thus winning the rooting interest of the Capitol crowd. Only that only causes real confusion between them. I kind of got, from the moment he said that he didn't want to go into the arena and become a monster, that Peeta would serve a purpose in Katniss's story. It's Katniss's compassion and defense of Rue and of Peeta that shows her humanity and, in fact, preserves it. Had everything been self-serving I dno't know that she could have handled the survivor guilt. And if Peeta is a reflection of her humanity, little wonder that Peeta comes away maimed. He kind of had to be. Unlike Katniss, who is our first person narrator, we only see Peeta on the outside, so the scars for him are primary physical and on the outside... at least until he's told that what he held onto wasn't exactly real.
Regarding Gale, I think that had things been different, had Katniss never been called, had District 12 been allowed to continue on as it was, I think Katniss would have grown up loving Gale and no one else. You don't get the sense that she had room to allow anyone else in. It's only because she was forced to give up home, to give up family, and to give up the idea of a future, that Peeta ever worked his way into her heart. But, again, for the structure of the stories I think that Peeta needs to be there. His presence often brings heightened emotional stakes. Without him, is she asking "Real or not real?" and that's one of the big recurring theme (through many things) that keep happening through the book. In the world of reality television (and in this case hyper-reality television, it's there's a very blurry line between what is real and what isn't. The books exploit this. It's an important question when the society being illustrated is one that likes to paint up their executions as though they're the Olympic games, where the news is at least partially faked, and where a shiny, 'everything is under control' surface is maintained even though there's reason to revolt everywhere.
What's real? The Games are a barbaric series of executions. What do the Capitol citizens see? The pageantry, the big 'effects sequences,' and the manufactured storylines. What's real? Two desperate, scared, kids fighting for their lives. What's the audience rooting for? Starcrossed lovers. And honestly, isn't that what the readers are rooting for as well? Aren't we reading about kids being killed and rooting for a love story? Ouch. But true. And even as the book closes, Katniss isn't entirely sure whether what she felt was real.
Book II - Catching Fire
A little too much time in the set-up. A little too much time spent on the fake wedding and on the clothes. And a little irritating that it starts with one of the more irritating things from Book 1, the belief that the berry incident was the real act of defiance when, really, it didn't strike me that it was. I thought the real defiance exhibited in Book 1 was compassion. The defiance was in Katniss choosing to be Rue's protector rather than her killer. It was in her kindness being repaid in kind by Thresh who spared Katniss's life when it may have been in his best interests to kill her there and then. It was in Katniss's and Peeta's refusal to become monsters, and, their ultimate refusal to turn on each other at the Capitol's whims. The moment with the berries was just sealing the gesture that had already been made. Katniss and Peeta were not going to kill each other. That they (apparently) chose mutual suicide (in a "real or not real? gesture. Yes it was a gambit, but if it didn't work, then they would've been dead) merely made it a Romeo and Juliet-esque tragic ending for the Capitol audience. Would the audience really have read it as the ultimate act of defiance? I don't think so. It was a great act to simply refuse to kill.
Which, honestly, was what I kept expecting to hapen in the Quarter Quell. But, before that, the book took off for me after the whole wedding nonsense and when they arrived in Rue's home. That Peeta's gesture to give Rue's family part of their winnings and Katniss's remembrance of Thresh and Rue resulted in the shocking murders in the wake of the celebration caused a gasp even as I read. It, again, was brutal. That's often the point where these books take flight. Now, back to the Quarter Quell where the book got rolling.
First off, how freaking sadistic was the Quarter Quell (and I in no way buy that this was something pre-determined in the box. This was President Snow's plan to kill two birds with one stone. How to solve a problem like Peeta and Katniss, and how to shock the Districts into submission... by taking their celebrities and their winners.) But to drag the old winners in, to choose among that very small group (who went into their 90s!) for another round of 'games.' How awful. But, um, what's bad for the Tributes is good for us, because the Quarter Quell brings us Finnick Odair and Johanna Mason, both of whom I love, love, love. We're shown with all the veterans that the price of winning is steep. They're all damaged in one way or another. Some, like Haymitch or the District 6 Morphlings bury themselves in drink and drugs as a method of dealing with having been the 'winner' of the Hunger Games. Some like Johanna are just... bitter. And who can blame her? How filled with rage and disgust must she be? Still, got to love a gal who covers her issues with cutting sarcasm... well, at least I've got to love her for it. And then there's Finnick, who when he steps out of playboy mode once he's in the game, quickly becomes a reassuring presence because of his competence. He's an ally that Katniss needed, one she and Peeta had to have in order to survive (he literally brings Peeta back to life at one point. Katniss's humanity would have been fatally damaged had he died. That line really got me. The one where Katniss realized that while there would be people who mourned Peeta if he died, she would be the only one irreparably damaged if Peeta died. And... cliffhanger. DAMN IT!
Katniss's ongoing humanity becomes a question when she realizes that Peeta was left behind, he's in the clutches of The Capitol. Meanwhile, it has been Gale and his strength that has protected her family once they set District 12 on fire.
Book III: Mockingjay (and in my head a subtitle "The Revolution Will Be Televised")
So um, yeah, District 13 exists and the "real/not real" question is being taken to a whole other level. We got the heads up about that in Book II with the refugees story about their trying to make it to District 13 and their story about the Capitol faking news casts by re-looping old footage of the decimated District 13 while hiding tthat 13 survived and now exists as a separate state. So it wasn't a complete surprise at the end of Book II to have the urban legend of District 13 continuing to exist be verified, but it did take some twists and turns I hadn't expected.
Also in the real/not real theme -- Katniss as rebel leader. It's mostly figurehead. She isn't really a military or a politcal leader. District 13 already has both. But she's chosen (or in fact was chosen long ago) to be used as the rallying symbol of revolution. She is propaganda She's a figure head as President Coin makes the plans and political machinations and there's a real military to fight the war. Katniss, however, is the face of the war on television, playing the role of leader and soldier for the cameras. But... that doesn't mean that her contributions are not real, or insignificant (particularly as it is a show of her own courage and her being shot that helps bind the Districts together in the final fight).
As the revolution is beginning to burn, as she becomes the face of a war, it shouldn't be a surprise that Peeta is a prisoner of the Capitol, being tortured so as to break Katniss or that Gale, protector of her family, fighter, hunter, and soldier is the one at Katniss's side. At this point, Katniss's humanity is being tested, tortured even with the choices that must be made, and it's the truth and image of hunter and soldier that she's needing right then (although, I think Finnick is partially taking Peeta's role while Peeta is absent. He is the one who sits with her when she has to watch Peeta be tortured. He's the one who reveals to her that both of them are being tortured by the state because they care about people trapped in the Capitol's prisons. Much like Peeta was often the one to express things that Katniss can't, it's Finnick's story of his past that captures the camera's attention and... oh Finnick. Being part of the Games wasn't his only hell. The State prostituted him. Literally. He's been carrying a shit load of problems beneath his snark and flirting. He's also, not coincidentally, part of a very real 'starcrossed lovers' situation (is it foreshadowing that his love Annie is also quite damaged?) Heck, Finnick and Peeta even share the same coloring and Gale's jealous of them both. Finnick fills some of the gap where Peeta should be, but I still can't help but think that Peeta should have had more presence in this book). Of course when he does show up it figures that he's royally messed up... just as Katniss is. Sometimes the sacrifices that are made, destroy people from the inside.
Real or not real?
It's was the strategy session about how to take down 'The Nut' that made me really begin to think of Gale and Peeta as reflections of Katniss. Gale is strategizing the downfall of the last remaining District and its fortress stronghold. And he is ruthless. He is the hunter personified. This is the way we smoke them out and they either die or surrender. He is the one willing to make the kill. He's what Katniss often sees herself as being... but she isn't really, because her immediate reaction to the plan of wholesale destruction is horror. It's not that Gale is wrong. His strategy is sane. In a war, to win a war, he's quite probably right. Scorched earth. It works.
But Katniss is repulsed, where's the humanity in that? How can they plan and execute a way that kills all those people in such a terrible way? On the other hand... it works. And what's the alternative? Continued war? She realizes this so we get her horror at witnessing the downfall of The Nut, and we get her rushing onto the scene of the probable execution of the survivors with an plea for peace... and her getting shot for her trouble.
So when Peeta finally does arrive... he's been destroyed. From the inside out. (And Johanna Mason with him, and she too is beautifully broken. So angry she's resorting to drug addiction and wanting to fight in the war... at the same time. She's had a fucking hard time. ::loves Johanna::)
They did it. They turned him into a monster, he was maimed in the first book, imprisoned at the end of the second, and now he can no longer able to tell the difference between what is real and what's not. He's a monster now. He calls himself one of the Capitol's genetic mutants. He's the weapon the Capitol has turned against Katniss, and he tries to choke the life out of her.
Once, he and Katniss had only had each other, and now...
It's every bit as devastating as Gale's ruthless plans and newly planned weapons. [On a side note, I kind of sadistically enjoy that the Capitol turned Peeta's love for Katniss against her, twisting the ambiguity that has always been in their relationship into a haze of confusion and betrayal that Peeta cannot make sense of. He's been specifically fashioned to be the weapon that destroys her. The person she'd die to save is the person sent to be her assassin...]
Real or Not Real?
Now the game is inverted. Or is it simply that the writer now shows that it's not a game or a spectacle at all. War itself is The Hunger Game. It is the war that has become The Arena, with the same dangers and traps... and the same terrible losses. (First Boggs and then... for God's sake FINNICK! Damn. Damn. Damn. Not Finnick too! ::sobs::) And yet, it's when things are all going to hell, in the darkest hour, that we see hints that there's something left of the 'real' Peeta beneath The Capitol's mind fuck.
Then the unthinkable happens... Primrose dies.
Sure it's contrived, but then, since Katniss later figures it out, that Primrose being in that situation was a deliberate plan, it's meant to be contrived. But it brings up the last point that I think is being made:
The Capitol is a grotesque example of Western culture -- the feckless consumption, the obsessions with celebrity, with fashion, with consuming more and more, while ignoring the plights of those who produce what the Capitol wastes. With turning obsessions with fashion and youth into over stretched, bizarre-looking creatures who have taken 'looking good' into something monstrous. The Capitol is all of that, but District 13...
There are at two revolutions against a decadent elite that quickly and easily come to mind -- the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Both started with ideals of equality of men. Both proclaimed that they were going to be a more 'fair' system. District 13, survivor of it's own struggles against The Capitol claims the same. It regiments that everyone must share. Everything is equal. Everything is for the collective good and the collective survival. And, like the aforementioned revolutions, which started with cries of liberty and equality...and morphed into bloodbaths of vengeance, first against the erstwhile oppressors, and then against and the populace they'd claimed to be trying to protect. District 13 is on the road to becoming the same. They no longer want just the destruction of Panem. They want the subjugation of The Capitol.
Katniss, the girl on fire, set fire to the revolution. And as she's repeatedly told that she 'did her job'. She brought the Districts together. From here on out, that's no longer the role that she plays.
In the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat became that revolution's fevered propagandist, writing screeds inciting and fomenting the Reign of Terror with calls of vengeance as reparation... that is until an ordinary girl, Charlotte Corday, assassinated him because she felt that the Reign of Terror had to end. ("I killed one man to save a hundred thousand")
For the last part of Mockingjay, this is the role that Katniss plays.
Peeta and Johanna are absent. Haymitch has 'betrayed' her. Finnick and Primrose are dead. Gale, the soldier, the one who fought the revolution, whose plans helped shape it, who most probably (and probably unintentionally) helped plan the double-bomb battle that slaughtered Katniss's sister Primrose along with other District and Capitol citizens. ('Protecting your family. It was the one thing I had going for me...').
The Rebellion, the 'good side' fighting against the barbaric oppressive State, has become the one slaughtering their children, starting the cycle all over again. Like the Reign of Terror, the revolution became more about vengeance than liberty, equality, and fraternity. President Coin wants to re-establish The Hunger Games... only now it is the Capitol that will be forced to sacrifice their children as tributes.
Katniss, the girl on fire, the one who sparked the revolution is the one who has to end it... by being Charlotte Corday. She becomes the assassin killing the mind behind the revolution, President Coin.
Katniss killed one woman, to save the children... and maybe a nation's soul.
The coda is perhaps somewhat improbable, but I'm sap enough to be glad that the book didn't end there. Sure, the chances are nil that Katniss would be allowed to live out her life in peace after killing both Presidents (because she did still, kinda sorta, kill President Snow). Equally unlikely is the idea that Peeta would somehow piece himself together... but I do not care. I wanted them to survive because so many other characters didn't (Oh Finnick! At least Annie has his child. But...erm... do we really buy that Annie would keep her sanity held together after Finnick's death? It may be best that we don't know the rest of that story. But at least Johanna has a chance... and if there's fanfic, I bet somewhere there is Johanna/Gale fanfic. Because they could work.) And at least Katniss and Peeta somehow find a way together and something that vaguely resembles peace of mind.
"You love me. Real or not real?"
Real.
I also understand why Lionsgate optioned the movie rights. It could be quite cinematic with big action sequences and a soap opera romantic triangle playing out for the Twilight crowd (though it seems horribly unfair to compare HG's relationship entanglements to Twilight. The HG characters are in no way frivolous. They have no time to be. There are no purple prose odes to sparkling abs.) Still, it would be easy for a movie studio to make it handsome alpha male versus artistic beta guy, and they would not be wrong. It's just that somewhere along the way it struck me that Gale and Peeta, while characters in their own right, also represent aspects of the heroine, Katniss. Gale is the hunter, the guy that rages--with reason--against the State and fights back. Peeta, the baker's son, is the guy who would offer bread to a starving girl, even knowing that he'll be punished for it (much as Katniss willingly sacrifices herself for her sister, taking Prim's place in the Games, knowing that it's a death sentence). He has empathy and compassion. Peeta won me as a reader when, before they were forced into the arena, he told Katniss:
"... I want to die as myself. Does that make any sense?{...} I don't want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I'm not..."
(Oh, Peeta...)
I was struck by one character's comment that Katniss would "choose the one she can't survive without." Living in such dire circumstances, Katniss interpreted that statement as her being thought of as a user, as an assumption that she would 'choose' what she could best exploit. As a reader I took it as meaning that it would come down to what part of herself could she not survive without -- the hunter or the baker (her inner warrior or her humanity.) The tension is not just a question of Pretty Boy A or Lovely Boy B, but who this harrowing journey will force Katniss to become before it's over. What parts of herself will she damage and lose, and what will she need in the end in order to survive.
The dystopian world where these characters live, fight and die is interesting enough to be worth thinking about in its own right (As are some of the secondary characters. I love Finnick Odair, Johanna Mason, and Haymitch as much as the primary characters. As previous year's Games victors, they illustrate how losing the Games may cost your life, but 'winning' can shred your soul. I also notice that, going by the previous victors, wits must trump brawn most of the time and there isn't a particular gender favor. There seem to be at least as many, if not more, female Games veterans as there are male.)
Anyway, the country of Panem rose out of the wreckage of what had once been the United States. Actually, what it says is "North America" so sorry, Canada and Mexico. I think you're toast too. There's no mention of the world outside of Panem's fascist borders, though the Capitol has absolute control over the flow of information, so I assume that the rest of the world is there. However there are hints of worldwide catastrophe (mentions of rising ocean levels, drowned cities, pandemics, and concerns about population size in relation to adequate genetic diversity.) Whatever happened, however, was far enough in the past that there is no living memory of it, nor any sense of restoring what was lost.
There's an interview with the author on YouTube where she mentions influences such as 1984 and The Lord of the Flies. And you can certainly see bits of their DNA in Panem and The Arena (the Olympic venue of Panem's annual gladiatorial games). In a written interview, Collins mentions the myth of Theseus, the Minotaur, and the Labyrinth of Crete where, after defeating Athens, King Minos's terms for surrender was that every year Athens had to send seven boys and seven girls to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur. Easy enough to see that influence in this story as well. Oh, and...
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: panem et circenses [bread and circuses] ~ Roman Poet Juvenal circa 100 A.D.
I see what you did there, Suzanne Collins. And did before late in the story a character decides to explain (which annoyed me a little, but then I reminded myself that this is a young adult series and so, perhaps, explanation along the way isn't a bad thing.)
Panem was originally formed as the (rather parasitic) Capitol and its thirteen enslaved districts that produce the food and goods that the Capitol consumes with uncaring fecklessness. (The Capitol has a gleaming city of extravagant entertainments where the populace is obsessed with the whims of fashion [Fur-lined underwear! Cat's eyes! Gold tattos! These people... they turn themselves into garish circus freaks] with food in excess and advanced medicine (especially in the form of plastic surgery) whereas the Districts live in fenced cities, heat their homes with coal fires, have only intermittent electricity, virtually non-existent health care [thus depending on herbal recipes and apothacaries], and then there's the unceasing hunger... always under the watchful eye of the Capitol's 'Peacekeeper' military forces). [And if a Capitol citizen develops a conscience and tries to speak out... their tongues are cut out and they too are enslaved as an 'Avox.']
Some seventy-five plus years prior to opening of the novel, there was a District uprising sparked by District 13. The Capitol responded by erasing District 13 out of existence...while reminding citizens constantly of its destruction. (Propaganda is omnipresent in these books, part of the layers of "Real or not real?" that pops up again and again. How much of 'reality television' is real? How much of the news (especially when it's treated the same way)? How much of what we do is playing a role for someone else and to meet expectations? How do you make such important distinctions when vital information is witheld? And how confused are you when the lines become so blurred between real and spectacle, politics and television, relationships and role play?) In memory of the failed uprising, the Capitol demands that each year, every remaining district select by lottery one boy and one girl to be sent to the Capitol, where they will be sent into The Arena (which is the Olympics meets Survivor... in hell). It's televised for the jaded Capitol citizen's amusement and broadcast to the Districts for required viewing (oh yes, the electricity works then) so that the Districts absorb the Capitol's message: We can take your children, slaughter them, make you watch, and there's nothing that you can do about it. All without fatally depleting an already precariously undersized population.
Um... yeah. Did I mention that this book series is dark?
Book 1 starts on the day of the "Reaping", the day of the lottery that selects the names for District 12's Tributes to compete in the seventy-fourth Hunger Games. When Katniss Everdeen's sister's name is drawn, Katniss throws herself on the stage, volunteering to go in her sister's place. The second name is Peeta Mellark, the boy who had given Katniss bread when her family had been starving to death after her father had died in the mines...
The Hunger Games
I think this is probably the best paced of the books. It cuts to the heart of the matter pretty darn fast. The reaping happens immediately and it's off to the Capitol.
And there's the first construction of the "real or not real?" confusion that takes place throughout all three books. To me, one of the most frustrating aspects (frustrating as opposed to the downright horrific aspects) is the American Idol/Dancing with the Stars part of it where the tribute is supposed to try to win the favor of the audience. It's appalling enough to be sent to one's death, worse to not even be able to show your contempt for the people that send you there. It's like reading those historical speeches Henry the VIII's victims made where they went to their death praising the king who sent them there. It's adding insult to injury. And yet Katniss is forced to ignore her own nature and try, because she promised her sister that she would try to survive.
Where I knew that I was 'all in' with the story was Rue. God. When I suddenly gulped and started crying as I realized what had happened to Rue, that was it. The writer had me. Katniss singing Rue into sleep/death was heartwrenching and made me love Katniss. For all that Katniss thinks of herself as being ruthless, time and time again she shows that there is something good at her core. Rue's death was haunting, which is why it works when it's invoked later, both when Katniss is confronted -- and spared -- by Thresh, and when the memory Rue is used in Book II.
Also the romance/non-romance stuff works for me here. The confusion of it works. Peeta and Katniss are playing out a storyline for the audience, one that might possibly work and convince the audience that they're starcrossed lovers thus winning the rooting interest of the Capitol crowd. Only that only causes real confusion between them. I kind of got, from the moment he said that he didn't want to go into the arena and become a monster, that Peeta would serve a purpose in Katniss's story. It's Katniss's compassion and defense of Rue and of Peeta that shows her humanity and, in fact, preserves it. Had everything been self-serving I dno't know that she could have handled the survivor guilt. And if Peeta is a reflection of her humanity, little wonder that Peeta comes away maimed. He kind of had to be. Unlike Katniss, who is our first person narrator, we only see Peeta on the outside, so the scars for him are primary physical and on the outside... at least until he's told that what he held onto wasn't exactly real.
Regarding Gale, I think that had things been different, had Katniss never been called, had District 12 been allowed to continue on as it was, I think Katniss would have grown up loving Gale and no one else. You don't get the sense that she had room to allow anyone else in. It's only because she was forced to give up home, to give up family, and to give up the idea of a future, that Peeta ever worked his way into her heart. But, again, for the structure of the stories I think that Peeta needs to be there. His presence often brings heightened emotional stakes. Without him, is she asking "Real or not real?" and that's one of the big recurring theme (through many things) that keep happening through the book. In the world of reality television (and in this case hyper-reality television, it's there's a very blurry line between what is real and what isn't. The books exploit this. It's an important question when the society being illustrated is one that likes to paint up their executions as though they're the Olympic games, where the news is at least partially faked, and where a shiny, 'everything is under control' surface is maintained even though there's reason to revolt everywhere.
What's real? The Games are a barbaric series of executions. What do the Capitol citizens see? The pageantry, the big 'effects sequences,' and the manufactured storylines. What's real? Two desperate, scared, kids fighting for their lives. What's the audience rooting for? Starcrossed lovers. And honestly, isn't that what the readers are rooting for as well? Aren't we reading about kids being killed and rooting for a love story? Ouch. But true. And even as the book closes, Katniss isn't entirely sure whether what she felt was real.
Book II - Catching Fire
A little too much time in the set-up. A little too much time spent on the fake wedding and on the clothes. And a little irritating that it starts with one of the more irritating things from Book 1, the belief that the berry incident was the real act of defiance when, really, it didn't strike me that it was. I thought the real defiance exhibited in Book 1 was compassion. The defiance was in Katniss choosing to be Rue's protector rather than her killer. It was in her kindness being repaid in kind by Thresh who spared Katniss's life when it may have been in his best interests to kill her there and then. It was in Katniss's and Peeta's refusal to become monsters, and, their ultimate refusal to turn on each other at the Capitol's whims. The moment with the berries was just sealing the gesture that had already been made. Katniss and Peeta were not going to kill each other. That they (apparently) chose mutual suicide (in a "real or not real? gesture. Yes it was a gambit, but if it didn't work, then they would've been dead) merely made it a Romeo and Juliet-esque tragic ending for the Capitol audience. Would the audience really have read it as the ultimate act of defiance? I don't think so. It was a great act to simply refuse to kill.
Which, honestly, was what I kept expecting to hapen in the Quarter Quell. But, before that, the book took off for me after the whole wedding nonsense and when they arrived in Rue's home. That Peeta's gesture to give Rue's family part of their winnings and Katniss's remembrance of Thresh and Rue resulted in the shocking murders in the wake of the celebration caused a gasp even as I read. It, again, was brutal. That's often the point where these books take flight. Now, back to the Quarter Quell where the book got rolling.
First off, how freaking sadistic was the Quarter Quell (and I in no way buy that this was something pre-determined in the box. This was President Snow's plan to kill two birds with one stone. How to solve a problem like Peeta and Katniss, and how to shock the Districts into submission... by taking their celebrities and their winners.) But to drag the old winners in, to choose among that very small group (who went into their 90s!) for another round of 'games.' How awful. But, um, what's bad for the Tributes is good for us, because the Quarter Quell brings us Finnick Odair and Johanna Mason, both of whom I love, love, love. We're shown with all the veterans that the price of winning is steep. They're all damaged in one way or another. Some, like Haymitch or the District 6 Morphlings bury themselves in drink and drugs as a method of dealing with having been the 'winner' of the Hunger Games. Some like Johanna are just... bitter. And who can blame her? How filled with rage and disgust must she be? Still, got to love a gal who covers her issues with cutting sarcasm... well, at least I've got to love her for it. And then there's Finnick, who when he steps out of playboy mode once he's in the game, quickly becomes a reassuring presence because of his competence. He's an ally that Katniss needed, one she and Peeta had to have in order to survive (he literally brings Peeta back to life at one point. Katniss's humanity would have been fatally damaged had he died. That line really got me. The one where Katniss realized that while there would be people who mourned Peeta if he died, she would be the only one irreparably damaged if Peeta died. And... cliffhanger. DAMN IT!
Katniss's ongoing humanity becomes a question when she realizes that Peeta was left behind, he's in the clutches of The Capitol. Meanwhile, it has been Gale and his strength that has protected her family once they set District 12 on fire.
Book III: Mockingjay (and in my head a subtitle "The Revolution Will Be Televised")
So um, yeah, District 13 exists and the "real/not real" question is being taken to a whole other level. We got the heads up about that in Book II with the refugees story about their trying to make it to District 13 and their story about the Capitol faking news casts by re-looping old footage of the decimated District 13 while hiding tthat 13 survived and now exists as a separate state. So it wasn't a complete surprise at the end of Book II to have the urban legend of District 13 continuing to exist be verified, but it did take some twists and turns I hadn't expected.
Also in the real/not real theme -- Katniss as rebel leader. It's mostly figurehead. She isn't really a military or a politcal leader. District 13 already has both. But she's chosen (or in fact was chosen long ago) to be used as the rallying symbol of revolution. She is propaganda She's a figure head as President Coin makes the plans and political machinations and there's a real military to fight the war. Katniss, however, is the face of the war on television, playing the role of leader and soldier for the cameras. But... that doesn't mean that her contributions are not real, or insignificant (particularly as it is a show of her own courage and her being shot that helps bind the Districts together in the final fight).
As the revolution is beginning to burn, as she becomes the face of a war, it shouldn't be a surprise that Peeta is a prisoner of the Capitol, being tortured so as to break Katniss or that Gale, protector of her family, fighter, hunter, and soldier is the one at Katniss's side. At this point, Katniss's humanity is being tested, tortured even with the choices that must be made, and it's the truth and image of hunter and soldier that she's needing right then (although, I think Finnick is partially taking Peeta's role while Peeta is absent. He is the one who sits with her when she has to watch Peeta be tortured. He's the one who reveals to her that both of them are being tortured by the state because they care about people trapped in the Capitol's prisons. Much like Peeta was often the one to express things that Katniss can't, it's Finnick's story of his past that captures the camera's attention and... oh Finnick. Being part of the Games wasn't his only hell. The State prostituted him. Literally. He's been carrying a shit load of problems beneath his snark and flirting. He's also, not coincidentally, part of a very real 'starcrossed lovers' situation (is it foreshadowing that his love Annie is also quite damaged?) Heck, Finnick and Peeta even share the same coloring and Gale's jealous of them both. Finnick fills some of the gap where Peeta should be, but I still can't help but think that Peeta should have had more presence in this book). Of course when he does show up it figures that he's royally messed up... just as Katniss is. Sometimes the sacrifices that are made, destroy people from the inside.
Real or not real?
It's was the strategy session about how to take down 'The Nut' that made me really begin to think of Gale and Peeta as reflections of Katniss. Gale is strategizing the downfall of the last remaining District and its fortress stronghold. And he is ruthless. He is the hunter personified. This is the way we smoke them out and they either die or surrender. He is the one willing to make the kill. He's what Katniss often sees herself as being... but she isn't really, because her immediate reaction to the plan of wholesale destruction is horror. It's not that Gale is wrong. His strategy is sane. In a war, to win a war, he's quite probably right. Scorched earth. It works.
But Katniss is repulsed, where's the humanity in that? How can they plan and execute a way that kills all those people in such a terrible way? On the other hand... it works. And what's the alternative? Continued war? She realizes this so we get her horror at witnessing the downfall of The Nut, and we get her rushing onto the scene of the probable execution of the survivors with an plea for peace... and her getting shot for her trouble.
So when Peeta finally does arrive... he's been destroyed. From the inside out. (And Johanna Mason with him, and she too is beautifully broken. So angry she's resorting to drug addiction and wanting to fight in the war... at the same time. She's had a fucking hard time. ::loves Johanna::)
"... I want to die as myself. Does that make any sense?" he asks. {...} "I don't want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I'm not..."
They did it. They turned him into a monster, he was maimed in the first book, imprisoned at the end of the second, and now he can no longer able to tell the difference between what is real and what's not. He's a monster now. He calls himself one of the Capitol's genetic mutants. He's the weapon the Capitol has turned against Katniss, and he tries to choke the life out of her.
Once, he and Katniss had only had each other, and now...
It's every bit as devastating as Gale's ruthless plans and newly planned weapons. [On a side note, I kind of sadistically enjoy that the Capitol turned Peeta's love for Katniss against her, twisting the ambiguity that has always been in their relationship into a haze of confusion and betrayal that Peeta cannot make sense of. He's been specifically fashioned to be the weapon that destroys her. The person she'd die to save is the person sent to be her assassin...]
Real or Not Real?
Now the game is inverted. Or is it simply that the writer now shows that it's not a game or a spectacle at all. War itself is The Hunger Game. It is the war that has become The Arena, with the same dangers and traps... and the same terrible losses. (First Boggs and then... for God's sake FINNICK! Damn. Damn. Damn. Not Finnick too! ::sobs::) And yet, it's when things are all going to hell, in the darkest hour, that we see hints that there's something left of the 'real' Peeta beneath The Capitol's mind fuck.
Then the unthinkable happens... Primrose dies.
Sure it's contrived, but then, since Katniss later figures it out, that Primrose being in that situation was a deliberate plan, it's meant to be contrived. But it brings up the last point that I think is being made:
The Capitol is a grotesque example of Western culture -- the feckless consumption, the obsessions with celebrity, with fashion, with consuming more and more, while ignoring the plights of those who produce what the Capitol wastes. With turning obsessions with fashion and youth into over stretched, bizarre-looking creatures who have taken 'looking good' into something monstrous. The Capitol is all of that, but District 13...
There are at two revolutions against a decadent elite that quickly and easily come to mind -- the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Both started with ideals of equality of men. Both proclaimed that they were going to be a more 'fair' system. District 13, survivor of it's own struggles against The Capitol claims the same. It regiments that everyone must share. Everything is equal. Everything is for the collective good and the collective survival. And, like the aforementioned revolutions, which started with cries of liberty and equality...and morphed into bloodbaths of vengeance, first against the erstwhile oppressors, and then against and the populace they'd claimed to be trying to protect. District 13 is on the road to becoming the same. They no longer want just the destruction of Panem. They want the subjugation of The Capitol.
Katniss, the girl on fire, set fire to the revolution. And as she's repeatedly told that she 'did her job'. She brought the Districts together. From here on out, that's no longer the role that she plays.
In the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat became that revolution's fevered propagandist, writing screeds inciting and fomenting the Reign of Terror with calls of vengeance as reparation... that is until an ordinary girl, Charlotte Corday, assassinated him because she felt that the Reign of Terror had to end. ("I killed one man to save a hundred thousand")
For the last part of Mockingjay, this is the role that Katniss plays.
Peeta and Johanna are absent. Haymitch has 'betrayed' her. Finnick and Primrose are dead. Gale, the soldier, the one who fought the revolution, whose plans helped shape it, who most probably (and probably unintentionally) helped plan the double-bomb battle that slaughtered Katniss's sister Primrose along with other District and Capitol citizens. ('Protecting your family. It was the one thing I had going for me...').
The Rebellion, the 'good side' fighting against the barbaric oppressive State, has become the one slaughtering their children, starting the cycle all over again. Like the Reign of Terror, the revolution became more about vengeance than liberty, equality, and fraternity. President Coin wants to re-establish The Hunger Games... only now it is the Capitol that will be forced to sacrifice their children as tributes.
Katniss, the girl on fire, the one who sparked the revolution is the one who has to end it... by being Charlotte Corday. She becomes the assassin killing the mind behind the revolution, President Coin.
Katniss killed one woman, to save the children... and maybe a nation's soul.
The coda is perhaps somewhat improbable, but I'm sap enough to be glad that the book didn't end there. Sure, the chances are nil that Katniss would be allowed to live out her life in peace after killing both Presidents (because she did still, kinda sorta, kill President Snow). Equally unlikely is the idea that Peeta would somehow piece himself together... but I do not care. I wanted them to survive because so many other characters didn't (Oh Finnick! At least Annie has his child. But...erm... do we really buy that Annie would keep her sanity held together after Finnick's death? It may be best that we don't know the rest of that story. But at least Johanna has a chance... and if there's fanfic, I bet somewhere there is Johanna/Gale fanfic. Because they could work.) And at least Katniss and Peeta somehow find a way together and something that vaguely resembles peace of mind.
"You love me. Real or not real?"
Real.
...what I need to survive is not Gale's fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.
