Mattastrophic
4/7/2012
The Hunger Games (2008) is the first book of a trilogy of the same name set at least a hundred years in the future in a post-cataclysm/post-collapse United States. In this world, the government has collapsed and North-Eastern Nevada has become beach-front property after the western seaboard sinks. Using this scrap of land between the Rockies and the new shores of the Pacific as a defensible base of operations dubbed simply The Capitol, an oppressive government overtakes the rest of what was the United States and parses it out into 13 separate Districts, each of which is accountable for producing certain goods and materials for the Capitol. Due to the lack of food and general squalor in the Districts, a civil war erupted against the Capitol that ended with the wholesale elimination of District 13, formerly New England.
As penance for the uprising, each of the 12 remaining Districts must send one male and one female from their population of 12-18 year-olds (chosen by lottery) to compete in The Hunger Games, a free-for-all fight to the death. This is not a Thunderdome type deathmatch in a tiny arena, but a game that can last weeks and spans many, many square miles of outdoor territory littered with cameras and perils. If your fellow competitors (called Tributes) don’t kill you, then starvation, the environment, and hazards put in place by the Gamekeepers probably will. For people in the Districts, The Hunger Games bring only heartbreak and sorrow and epitomize the Capitol’s depraved indifference towards their starving subjects. For citizens of the Capitol, however, the games are the highlight in that year’s entertainment, hyped and produced to an extent that puts the Super Bowl to shame.
The book features two Tributes chosen by lottery from District 12 (Appalachian coal country): Katniss Everdeen, our first-person narrator (a huntress who has been been poaching from the District’s forests to feed her family for years), and Peeta Mellow (the stout son of a baker). Coming from one of the more deprived and backwater districts with a drunk for a mentor, Katniss and Peeta’s trip to the Capitol for The Hunger Games is tinged with the certainty that they will die. As they discover the usefulness of their own abilities and will to survive, however, they realize they may have a chance to win, despite the hazards of the arena and the other Tributes, some of whom have been preparing for the Games all their life. They know that to lose means death, and to win means a life of comparable luxury for the winner and his/her family. They also know that their can be only one winner, and so they struggle to keep an emotional distance from one another since soon they will have to fight to the death.
This is the first novel I have reviewed on this blog that falls into the “Young Adult” category, but it’s really a book that can appeal to both the YA and adult audiences. The characters feel well-rounded (which instantly differentiates it from Battle Royale and Mean Guns), the plot is well-paced, the action is visceral without being over the top and gratuitous, the setting is well used, and it’s all driven by a palpable layer of suspense that kept me interested and invested throughout.
I find three words that tend to characterize most post-apocalyptic/post-collapse novels and dystopias (those I have read or know about, at least): bleak, bleak, and bleak. Sometimes this bleakness can be a real turnoff towards reading it, unless you are the type of person who likes wallowing in despair. The Hunger Games certainly has some bleak moments in it, although Collins has made a political and even environmental landscape that is different enough (given new species of animals created through genetic manipulations) to give the impression that this is a new kind of world rather than one living in the bones of the old one.
Characterization is pretty strong in this book. The plot moves pretty fast in the beginning as Katniss, our narrator, leaves her hometown quickly for the games. She also spends a lot of time by herself in the wilderness during the games themselves. When you do that as an author, you had better have an interesting narrator since listening to an annoying character drone on and on with too few other characters to break the monotony can sound the death knell of the novel. Thankfully, Katniss is a character it’s easy to get invested in. She is motivated to win the games because of the keen sense of responsibility she feels to return home to take care of her little sister and her mother (who mentally collapsed for a time after the death of their father), but at the same time she struggles with the idea of killing to win the games. Indeed, she sees all the tributes as victims of the Capitol, and there is a lot of tension between her desire to undermine the Hunger Games and the neccessity to play to the cameras (which are everywhere) and play to the crowd (which are required by law to watch) to ensure her chances of survival. Katniss is also well-presented as a teenage girl thrust out of her element and trying to figure herself out just as she is trying to figure out what to do to survive. Peeta, the other contestant from Katniss’ district, is also pretty well characterized throughout, and when the games begin and other characters besides the tributes fall away, the dynamic between Peeta and Katniss when they are together in the wilds kept me interested. Collins nicely balances their efforts to play to the crowd, their struggles with whether to remain distant or to band together (since there can be only one winner), and their back stories to keep the whole thing rolling along.
Katniss has grown up using the bow and arrow to provide food for her families, and while she is very good with it I was glad that Collins didn’t make her conveniently uber-awesome with it, like when the band of survivors of the zombie apocalypse in The Undead Situation just happen to join up with an ex marine who is still an expert marskwoman. It seems to me that women are always made archers in movies, I guess because visually it fits the frame of those starlets better than a battleaxe, but anyone who has done archery can tell you it takes strength, coordination, and practice, practice, practice. Collins presents Katniss as someone who was relying on her bow for survival in the wilds even before her time in the Hunger Games, but even so she is limited in some important ways. The same goes for Collins’ presentation of Katniss’ survival skills during the Games: while she knows a lot more about surviving in the wild than most of the other Tributes, she doesn’t have an easy time of things. Given that this is the first book of a trilogy and it is told from a first-person perspective, one might assume that Katniss will survive, especially given her talents for keeping herself alive in the woods, but Collins does a nice job of showing the limits of Katniss’ skill and her physical and mental limits, particularly under the pressure of the Games, so that one isn’t so sure if Katniss is going to live through this, first-person narrator or not.
I also found the scale of the book pleasing as well. The largest chunk of the book focuses on the events of the Hunger Games themselves, on Katniss trying to find supplies or a place to hide from other Tributes. While I gather that the next couple of books will focus more on subverting the Capitol, this book kept me very interested by focusing on the minute-to-minute tension of Katniss in the wild: the fear, the uncertainty, the hunger, the suffering, etc. This made me very invested in the characters and concerned for what happens to them. It felt a bit like Frodo and Sam’s trip to Mordor in The Lord of The Rings sans the homoerotic tension: characters are pushed to their physical breaking limits in an unforgiving landscape and have to work very hard to keep that ember of hope alight.
This series has been pretty popular, particularly with several of my friends, and with a movie version coming out early in 2012, I decided to give it a go. When I first heard about the plot, I had two thoughts: first, “Wow, that sounds pretty raw for a YA novel,” and second , “That sounds a lot like Battle Royal.” Battle Royale is a Japanese novel that was made into an incoherent movie where a repressive government takes a busload of schoolkids, straps explosive collars to their necks, and tells them to fight each other or face explosive decapitation. It’s a story that just solidifies my theory that the Japanese have a perplexing fetish about teenage boys and girls in school uniforms committing horrific acts of violence. Collins’ book also sounds kind of like the more enjoyable (and more coherent) 1997 B-movie Mean Guns where a crime syndicate decides to clean out it’s roster of undesirables by wrangling all of them into an empty prison, giving them guns and ammo, telling them that the last man standing gets a million dollars, and then saying “begin!” While those two stories seem to be more about glorifying the violence, The Hunger Games uses the same formula of a forced free-for-all with some reluctant contestants to better and more meaningful effect. Each contestant is, in their way, a victim of the Capitol and the Hunger Games, and while they want to survive Katniss and Peeta do not want to turn into cold-blooded killers just to please the sycophants in the Capitol. Indeed, certain deaths in the book weigh heavily on them, making the violence, thrilling as it is at times, meaningful to the overall plot and not just gratuitous.
After reading this book, I’m left with only a vague idea about the social and historical at forces in Collins vision of future North America. I was able to catch on and run with the idea of a post-cataclysm and/or post-collapse United States being divided into dictatorial fiefdoms under the control of a central Capitol situated in a geographically defensible position. Since I have lived in Kentucky all of my life, and since I’m dating a girl from Appalachian coal-mining country, I can also picture what District 12 might look like, which helped me sympathize with Katniss and her family’s struggles. Outside of that, I have a ton of unanswered questions. How far into the future is this? What was the exact nature of the cataclysm or collapse that put North America into such dire straits? How is such a large disparity in resources and technological capability between the Capitol and the Districts maintained? Perhaps I missed the answer to some of these questions in my reading, but in many dystopian and post-collapse novels there is usually a lot of reflection about what life was like long ago before the disasters that brought about the dystopia. Not so in Collins’ novel.
There is also a lot of handwaiving on the technology side of the book: we have hovercrafts, weather control, near-miraculous medicine, and no explanation of how it is all possible or what some of it looks like. For example, I had no idea what these hovercrafts were supposed to look like, so I just imported a mental image of a shuttlecraft from Star Trek. How the hell do the Gamekeepers control the weather in the game arena? Granted, this novel is told in the first person and the sketchiness of the historical and technological details may just reflect how little Katniss knows of such things. The book is also written to include a YA audience that is probably not that market for hard SF. Still I felt that a bit more could have been done in this area. Arthur C. Clarke’s famously stated that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and some of the tech. discussed or implied in the book seems too magical at times to seem like technology at all. Presenting it as magical or unfathomable might have been better, since that would have added a bit more to the sense of wonder of the story.
Darko Suvin wrote that two key aspects of all SF are estrangement and cognition. To put it more simply, the strange and the familiar. We need both to make a good SF story work. The strange creates that sensawunda and opens up new possibilities to us through technology, radical social/historical developments, ecological change, etc. The familiar is a key complimentary component, however. We need characters and humanizing elements that we can sympathize with to help us understand and access the strange. Despite the sketchiness of the historical and technological details, The Hunger Games balances both elements very well to show us a vision of North America that is recognizable yet strange. The real strength of the book is in character development, particularly in the characters of Katniss, Peeta, and Haymitch (the aforementioned drunken mentor), and since Haymitch is largely developed in absentia through actions Katniss has to interpret and read into, that’s saying something about Collins’ writing chops. Overall, the book was a real page turner (well, I read it on my Kindle, but calling it a “real-’Next Page’-button-presser doesn’t work as well). The basic plot device of the Hunger Games was simple but dynamic enough to stay interesting throughout. The plot was well-paced, the action was satisfying and the suspense was well crafted. The development of the central characters felt very believable and effectively pulled at my heartstrings. I devoured this book in about a day and a half and it lived up to the hype.
http://www.strangetelemetry.wordpress.com