Talked to a friend about the ending of the Hunger Games. Totally agreed with her. I had seen all the twists coming a mile off and wasn’t surprised by anything in it at all. In a way, there was nowhere left for her to go other than to try and plunge her created world into its own civil war, but in the end it unbalanced the whole thing, making this a totally different kind of book to the first. It was hard to care about the people involved. I even lost the will to care about Katniss herself... she wasn’t the victim any more but now the victimiser. The war made her an active participant in the destruction of the oppressive state, and so more responsible.
I secretly think this is what the anti-capitalist movement of the present age really wants - protest without responsibility. In the 1960s, it was clear what the Paris protesters wanted - basically they wanted France to be like the USSR - their agenda was hard-line Marxist and they were all signed up for that. In the wake of 1968, the French Communist Party was a major force in their politics through the 1970s and into the 1980s. What sort of system do the new protesters want? Well.... um... er, it’s hard to say. In The Hunger Games, Katniss takes responsibility for her beliefs, but in the end she shows that what she wants is not President Snow and not President Coin either.* A plague on both your houses. Let’s just settle down and play nice and forget about politics altogether. She’s about what she doesn’t want, not what she does want... again in step with the present day anti-capitalist movement.
Kate’s point was a very sharp observation - the mother just disappears out of the narrative. Katniss doesn’t talk to her any more and there’s no reason for that, she just doesn’t. The little sister stops being a character and then, ultimate tragedy, gets killed off - and she was the very reason this all happened in the first place. Without her Katniss wouldn’t have become involved. and what would the rebels have done then? It’s meant to be a terrible irony, but in the book it just comes across as another piece of laziness, just adding one more twist without thinking it through. The emotional reactions of the characters just don’t engage here. Peeta and Katniss swip-swap love/hate all the way and it becomes confusing at first and then just boring. I didn’t care whether these were his true feelings or the ones Snow had implanted... Get over it!
The weakness of this last book was the sheer scale of the conflict it tries to describe. The Hunger Games themselves are like war in miniature, and are superbly depicted. One of the strengths of the first novel was how little exposition Katniss provides. She assumes her readers are familiar with the Games, have seen many of them already on television. We are surprised by new turns in the plot, but we understand, without pages of explanation. This is not the case in Mockingjay, where massive screeds of print are needed to fill in back story and explain the progress of the war. The scale overwhelms the storytelling. The second half is stronger, but the ending is a let-down. There’s a Harry Potter coda, of course, which basically tells the audience just what J K Rowling wanted hers to hear - there’ll be no more books. But in this case there is not the satisfaction of that end. It’s just too pat, too simplistic. It reads almost as though she’d become tired of explaining and wanted it to end.
The one area where she scores is in how eerily her imagined scenarios have come to look almost like predictions of real life events. The ‘Hunger Games’ arenas with their ‘career tributes’ hunting down and killing the innocent children - how closely does the killing spree on an island haven by the Norwegian murderer Anders Breivik resemble this situation? He even used the same trickery to lure the hiding out into the open that the Gamesmakers and ‘Careers’ employ - making fake police safety announcements. He relished the pleas of the dying, just as Cato would have done. The very setting, in this countryside park on an island in a lake could so easily be a Games arena... Breivik, like President Snow, even tried to paste a ludicrous ‘political’ justification across his atrocities, as though he were ‘saving’ Norway through his actions, and maintaining its peace. In the same way, the spectacle of the Games is pure, grisly entertainment for the Capitol’s TV viewers. They are encouraged to believe that they are somehow preventing another war. Ironically, they end up starting one.
And... and then there is the Arab Spring. How do the Hunger Games begin? With ‘the girl on fire’. How did the Arab Spring begin? With a man on fire - an unemployed Tunisian who immolated himself as a protest against his government. This desperate blaze ignited first his whole country, then Egypt, then Libya, then Yemen and Bahrain, and now Syria. How closely does the conflict in The Hunger Games look like the Libya war? Very closely, is the answer, with the ‘districts’ fighting against one another, getting closer to the Capital, with Gaddafi trying to obliterate entire regions, just like President Snow. Compare Snow’s destruction of District 12 with Gaddafi’s plan to obliterate Benghazi. Compare Snow’s bombardment of 13 with Gaddafi’s onslaught against Misurata and then that city’s heroic defiance... And finally...
How very similar was Gaddafi’s final hour to that of Snow? Superficially different, but in both cases the assassins track down the leader in the firm belief that killing him will end the war. In both cases the death of the leader is shown live on TV as his executioners parade him in front of the cameras. In both cases the body is surrounded by a maddened, chaotic crowd. In both cases, uncertainty surrounds what really happened. In the final Hunger Games book, President Snow is tied to a stake, fully expecting Katniss to shoot him. Yet when she doesn’t, he strangely dies anyway, perhaps from some kind of poison... Wonder who gave that to him?
In the real war in Libya, an intensive search of the capital, Tripoli, ended when rebel fighters found Colonel Gaddafi hiding in a sewer pipe. They dragged him out of the drain, where he had been cowering like a rat. He sobbed and begged for help, saying he was hurt. Later, when Gaddafi’s bloody dead body was displayed to the world on a stretcher, the rebels swore to NATO that they hadn’t shot him. They claimed instead that he died before they had a chance to kill him, from wounds apparently inflicted earlier, by his own men... Did we believe them? Probably not. Did we care? Certainly not. Gaddafi was a mass murderer and, as in the case of Saddam, a trial would have been highly inconvenient to the West. Many of the same desires to avoid awkward questions and cover up disquiet over the evils of the rebels are strongly suggested in Mockingjay.
And in Syria - see how closely President Assad follows the same pattern of attack against his own districts as President Snow does in the final book. The turning point in this story is the killing of the children and the most recent massacre of children in Syria by the government’s forces may finally have turned the tide of opinion in the outside world towards arming the rebels and overthrowing the regime. The shelling of unarmed civilians, the desperate measures taken by the ruling elite to stay in power all are strange echoes of the events in the last book.
These things don’t really make me care much more or even at all about the characters in the book, though, but there is a sense in which these novels have caught a remarkable scent on the air of history, have tuned into a real underlying theme in modern politics. No-one in the west saw the Arab Spring coming, but perhaps Suzanne Collins, in a subliminal way, had a foretaste of it.
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