Mockingjay
What if the future were a giant reality television show in which children were pitted against each other in an elaborate fight to the death, in which politics, war and entertainment had finally become indistinguishable? This is the question raised by Suzanne Collins’s brutal and absorbing Hunger Games trilogy and answered in the much anticipated final instalment, Mockingjay.
The premise of the series is that a corrupt and decadent Capitol rules over 12 impoverished districts in Panem, in the ruins of North America. Every year the Capitol authorities stage a “reaping,” in which a girl and a boy from each district are chosen by lottery to be tributes in the Hunger Games. When her younger sister is picked, the heroine, Katniss Everdeen, volunteers to take her place, and with the others is styled, trained and then placed in a spectacularly designed high-tech arena, to fight in the televised games until only one contestant survives.
The trilogy balances seriousness with special effects, a fundamental furious darkness with fast-paced storytelling, so that the books manage to be simultaneously disturbing and fun. They contain a sharp satire of celebrity culture, mindless tabloidism and decadence, as well as crusading teenagers trying to save the world; but they also resist our hunger for clear definitions of good and evil, our sentimental need for a worthwhile cause, our desire for happy or simple endings, or even for the characters we like not to be killed or tortured or battered or bruised in graphic ways. Like the evil Capitol that controls and shadows its world, the trilogy tends to use the things we are attached to against us.
The 17-year-old girl at the centre of the revolution is a great character without being exactly likable. Katniss is bossy, moody, bratty, demanding as well as prickly. She treats the world with an explosive aggression that is a little out of the ordinary, to say the least. She greets an admirer’s expression of love by knocking him down, slams a door on another’s face during an argument, shoots an arrow at a panel of judges before the Games begin and threatens a mentor with a knife when he says something she doesn’t like. In short, she belongs to a recent tribe of popular heroines – the small, difficult teenage girl who manifests enormous physical and moral strength. She is both murderer and victim, somehow representing female strength and female vulnerability all mingled and entwined, dangerously, ambiguously, into one. She is mesmerising in her way of defying authority, antisocial, courageous and angry self-involved, yet sweepingly sympathetic.
Katniss also has not one but two love interests, Peeta and Gale. She vacillates between them until the very last pages, when she somewhat randomly ends up with one. She can’t choose and gets sulky when anyone suggests she should. Though both are impossibly devoted, brave and hand, the narrative never lets either get the upper hand.
The entire series, Mockingjay in particular, also offers an investigation of the future frontier of the screen: there are cameras everywhere recording at the outer limits of experience. At one point Katniss says, “I look to the screen, hoping to see them recording some wave of reconciliation going through the crowd. Instead I watch myself get shot on television.” After Katniss’s daring acts of battle, all varieties of exhaustion and physical disfigurement, her team of stylists is constantly trying to “remake her to Beauty Base Zero”, the way she would look if she got out of bed looking “flawless but natural”. In other words, the books offer a brutal meditation on how absurd, bloody and prurient our worst impulses are for a generation that is interested in the outcome of Britain’s Next Top Model.
Watching young people kill each other might seem a little sick and unhinged. This is not an author to delicately avert her gaze. Our voyeurism is fully engaged in these books, but so intelligently, adeptly engaged that it does not feel trashy or gratuitous. As Katniss herself says in Mockingjay, “There are much worse games to play."
