The Hunger Games Trilogy

*Spoiler Alert: I'm going to talk about all three of the novels, so if you haven't finished them yet, don't read any further! I also ruin a couple other novels, so be careful.* 

I'm not one to give into trends just because everyone else is doing them. Just because something is popular doesn't necessarily mean that it is good, so before I read a trendy book or shell out the money to see a big-name film, I check to see what critics are saying about it and how friends with similar tastes feel. I put off reading Eat, Pray, Love because every Oprah-watching soccer mom I ever met swore by it, and I don't usually have the same tastes in books as they do; but after seeing the author speak in a TED talk, I gave the book a chance and loved it. I was anxious to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, especially after a movie adaptation was announced, but after the advice of a similar-minded friend who said "don't waste your time," I chose not to read it.

So when everyone and their mother started talking about The Hunger Games, I was only somewhat interested. Another YA trilogy about a teenage girl? There are a million of those out right now, filling up the somewhat depressing "Supernatural Romance" shelf in the teen section at Barnes & Noble. Not worth my time. But then people started telling me I needed to read it - people I majored in English with at college, well-read people studying to be teachers, basically everyone who loved the same books I did. So I decided to give it a chance, picked up a copy at the bookstore - and read the first book in less than two days. I was hooked.

I described the first novel to my sister as a cross between Harry Potter and The Giver. Suzanne Collins writes much like J.K. Rowling, with simple fluid words, captivating characters, and forward-marching plots that leave you telling yourself, just one more chapter, then I'll stop for a while. And much like when I read Rowling's books, I couldn't put them down and devoured them almost all in one sitting. The Harry Potter series, The Giver, and The Hunger Games trilogy have one pivotal thing in common: they are using the experiences of a single character in order to teach the reader a much larger lesson about life. Potter is about friendship, loyalty, doing what's right in the face of adversity. The Giver is about remembering your past, gaining knowledge, learning what it means to be human. The Hunger Games is about protecting the innocent, ending senseless wars, and doing what is right for your community.

The first novel had me captivated. Katniss is a different type of heroine: tomboyish, intelligent, and brave, but views herself as no one special and has a hard time understanding what everyone else sees in her. She is compassionate, although she doesn't like to show weakness; is pretty, but in a simple way; and responsible almost to a fault. She's complicated - which makes her realistic. The first book introduced us to Panem, the country governed by the spoiled and treacherous Captial, and the Games, which were contrived to put each of the twelve Districts into their place by forcing them to watch their children fight each other to the death on live television as if it were a horrible version of Survivor mixed with American Idol. But despite the pageant-like interviews, the training, the blood-thirsty teenagers and cruel Gamemaker's twists that reminded me of The Truman Show, Katniss and her fellow tribute Peeta buck the system, getting the Capitol to let both of them survive by pretending to be in love and drawing on the emotions of the audience.

The second novel shows us just how vile the Capitol really is. In a power-play after being upstaged from a couple of teenagers from the least important district, they announce that the next Games, in honor of their 75th year, will be comprised of previous winners fighting to leave one victor alive. Think Survivor: All-Star but with people ranging from 17 to 80, many of whom have gone nearly insane after surviving their own games only to have to serve as a mentor to other young tributes and watch them die year after year. This rag-tag group of people are forced to compete and quietly bind together in order to break out of the arena and escape to the supposedly-destroyed District 13, where they start a rebellion against the Capitol.

Katniss finds herself at the center of the rebellion, as its symbol, the Mockingjay. In the third book we learn that her hometown has been destroyed and many of its people lost their lives. Kind-hearted Peeta has been captured and tortured into believing he hates Katniss. The president has a personal vendetta against her. She is injured and traumatized over the fact that she has caused all of the problems the world is now facing. I keep having to remind myself that she's only 18 and has experienced so much death, destruction and heartbreak. It's no wonder she is often hiding in closets. When she regains some strength she starts visiting other districts in hopes of rallying the troops and giving the rebellion some hope for their future. Eventually she and other members of the rebellion take the capital - but not without the loss of plenty more lives, including that of her beloved sister, which sets her over the edge. The leader of District 13 takes over as president and proposes a new version of the Games, this time pitting the survivors of the Capitol leaders against each other. Katniss, who seems to be the only one seeing the big picture, realizes that as long as someone tries to gain power by force and punishment, nothing will ever truly change. So she kills the president from 13, forever cancelling the Hunger Games as a national show of power. Finally she is sent back to her home in 12, to live out the rest of her life, knowing that despite all she did to protect her little sister, she couldn't save her in the end.

And now for the Epilogue. At the end of the series, Katniss is a mess. Her sister is dead, her mother has left her, her best friend is never coming back, and the deaths of all of those she was forced to kill or inadvertently caused to die haunt her forever. But a new Panem is emerging, one that is a much better place than the one she grew up in. And as the years go by she and Peeta come to rely on each other again, and in the end they are together, raising their children, collecting and honoring the memories of all those who fought in the Games, getting through the hard times by focusing on the good ones.

I know a lot of people were disappointed with the end of the series. I believe that it was a perfect ending in the sense that it could not have happened any other way. After everything that happened - the Games, the rebellion, the deaths - there is no way there could have been a happy white-picket-fence ending. At the end of the day, this was a tale of war and loss and coming out on the other side - it was not intended as a love story. I wanted Katniss and Peeta to live happily ever after just like everyone else, but given the life they led and the world they live in, it would have been a disservice to portray them as a perfect couple in such a broken and imperfect world. Personally, I can't think of a better way to end the book than with them, together, surviving, and happy, or at least as happy as they can be. Was it sad to see them afraid to have children, tortured by nightmares, disturbed by the world around around them? Of course. But that is what war does to people. It's not pretty. When I closed the third and final book my heart felt heavy for them, as it did at the end of 1984 when despite everything Winston does to rebel , he finds himself betraying his true love and succumbing to Big Brother. Or at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when the Chief suffocates McMurphy for his own good. Or in Never Let Me Go, where Kath must guide her friends toward death as they are forced to donate their organs as they are were clones created for spare parts.

Have you seen the film Stranger Than Fiction with Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson? I features Ferrel as a man who finds himself to be the main character in a novel being written by Thompson. She has decided that his character will die, and doesn't want to change the ending, because as a writer, when you create a character they take on a life of their own and sometimes you have to let them do things that you don't want them to do. It's what makes them real. I remember seeing an interview with Rowling where she said how much she cried when she killed Cedric, because she didn't want him to die, but knew he had to. That's what happened with Katniss and Peeta - Collins couldn't have written them happy-go-lucky, it wasn't in their nature. And I'm glad they weren't forced into that role.

In the end, I'm glad I read these books, and highly recommend them. They're hard to read, but equally hard to put down. 

Brave New World

This month it was time again for a pre-1970's selection, and the lot fell to Brave New World, the 1932 classic from author Aldous Huxley. It's a small novel, but one that is often referenced and is most likely on the same Time Magazine's Top 100 Novels of All Time list that the majority of these books are included on. Finally having a day free to read I delved in and hoped that I would like it as much as I was told that I would.

I knew that it would be about a utopia, judging by the French epigraph, which when translated spoke of the reality of utopian societies and the fact that modern society may instead be turning towards the imperfect. Chapter one threw me into the heart of the "new world" - the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where individuals were cloned, predetermined, actualized, and molded into who society need them to be.

In this new society, children are taught to want to do the job they've been created for, and to be glad that they are in their specific strata and therefore not envious of anyone else. "Everyone is happy nowadays" is a phrase characters often utter; and indeed they are -  stresses, tragedies, passions, every sort of extreme has been erased from their lives, leaving them to live in the moment and feel good about it. Religion has been replaced with industrialism, with Ford being used in place of God, obviously an homage to Henry Ford, his Model-T (all crosses have been repurposed as T's), and his ways of capitalism and assembly lines. Freud is thrown into this odd religion/patriotism (they believe Freud is Ford's psychological persona) and subsequently all happiness and entertainment is sexual in nature. Promiscuity among children is encouraged, all films are pornographic and/or violent and relationships have disappeared in favor of "everyone belongs to everyone else" mentality. With cloning as the main means of reproduction, nuclear families have also disappeared and asking someone about their mother is a dirty insult. Humans almost world-wide are psychologically trained to accomplish exactly what society needs them to, and they are more than content to follow along unquestionably. 

I am really fascinated that I happened to line up this novel directly after Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It's interesting to see how two different authors, 50 years apart, present a utopian society and the people in it. Huxley's world looked forward to the future, while Atwood's world did the opposite and reverted to the past. Atwood's characters could remember the world before the utopia, while Huxley's characters knew nothing of the past. Atwood used surrogates to repopulate the human race, Huxley used artificial cloning. Yet somehow, they both taught the same message: Utopians are unnatural. They do not work, no matter how complicated or simplistic they are created to be.

I loved Huxley's jumping between characters and storylines, especially in Chapter Three with the juxtaposition of at least three stories told alternately one line at a time. Brilliant. I also enjoyed the inclusion of John, the savage, and his love of Shakespeare. Ironically, the one that is considered the most uncouth is instead the most intelligent and the most aware of what is actually going on in the world. He's the one who fights for religion, for modesty, for goodness, for education - and when he learns that nowhere in the world, not on the reservation or the outside, is any of this accomplishable, he kills himself rather than succumb to the modern ideal.

It's no wonder that this is considered a classic. It speaks of the human condition, what is important in life, and what is important enough to die for. It forewarns the dangers of putting too much stock in industrialization, of ignoring education and history, and of altering the natural way of life. And all in less than 200 pages.

The Handmaid's Tale

First and foremost, you should know that I am a little biased when it comes to Margaret Atwood. The first book of hers that I read was The Blind Assassin for a course I took on contemporary literature, which I absolutely loved (both the novel and the class). Since that time I have read two more of her novels, not including this one, and own three of her collections of poetry. I am a huge fan of her writing and included her on my 2011 reading list as an excuse to read more of her work.

I chose The Handmaid's Tale because of it's popularity and the fact that the description on the back of the book made absolutely no sense. Offred? The Republic of Gilead? I love reading books that I am intrigued and confused by. As with the other books I've read so far, I made a point not to research it or read any reviews before reading it, so that I can experience it without any preconceptions.

As I started reading, I found myself in the not-too-distant future, where society is structured much like that of the Biblical Old Testament - patriarchal, with women reduced to a status significantly lower than their male counterparts. In the new Republic of Gilead, where the novel takes place, men are employed in a military-style hierarchy ranging from lowly servant types to powerful commanders. Women are categorized by the role they are expected to fill, including Wives (those technically married to the men), Marthas (serving women), Handmaids (young women whose sole job is to reproduce), and Aunts (women who teach the Handmaids). This bizarre reorganization of societal roles emphasizes the new mentality that life is only rules and regulations; no longer are emotions and individual thoughts important. It reminded me a lot of The Giver, the young adult novel where villagers must get permits to have children, jobs and marriages are assigned, and only one person in each generation can see color.

The scariest part of this novel is how quickly the new Republic of Gilead took over, and how creepily plausible the transition from typical American society to cult regime actually was. One day people were going about their lives, the next women were no longer allowed to work or spend money and the soldiers posted nearby were suspiciously wearing unfamiliar uniforms. Atwood created an authentic sense of dystopia, where in contrast to a far-fetched futuristic novel, this featured a situation that actually could happen. All of the characters in the new Gilead, even the men who seem to be in powerful positions, are under the control of some larger organization that quietly gained power and is never discussed. Other than the fact that they employ Eyes as their scouts, we (both the reader and the narrator) know nothing about them.

This unnamed, invisible leadership was a brilliant move by Atwood. They--whoever they are--created a "monotheocracy," as its called in the Historical Notes section, and used religion to back up their new laws and regulations. Biblical scripture is twisted and altered to instate the Handmaids and Marthas (both Biblical references) and to push the female population into submission. But despite the "manifest destiny"-like propaganda that God ordained this rather than the government, the people don't seem to believe it. They're simply afraid of the consequences - and rightly so, for those are also of Biblical proportion. In this new Gilead where punishments that rely on psychology are the norm (such as hangings displayed publicly as examples, or male rapists presented to groups of rallied women for group beatings reminiscent of stonings, it is easier for the characters to repress their memories of the world before and follow the rules, at least on the surface. Under the surface, however, is an entire network of people trying to escape to a life that even remotely resembles the one they knew before.

It is revealed at the end that this book, much like The Blind Assassin, is essentially a nested narrative - the entire book is a transcript of a recorded diary found much later by a society that has thankfully progressed past the "Gilead" stage. This new society, set in 2195 when the outer narrative takes place, looks back at Gilead much like we do pre-Civil War slavery or the Salem witch trials. They study it, teach courses on it in their universities, collect artifacts from the period. There is something unsettling about this future society of 2195 that comes about in their "Historical Notes" epilogue.  In one of the few pop-cultural references say that they "must be grateful for any crumbs that the Goddess of History has deigned to vouchsafe us." They also reference Eurydice, the daughter of Apollo in Greek mythology that dies but is retrieved from the underworld. Is this new society female-centric?

I have so many questions that remain unanswered. What caused the fall of Gilead? Was Offred ever reunited with her daughter? Was anything ever done to memorialize the women objectified by Gildeadeans, or are gaudy things like the "Outdoor Period-Costume Sing-Song" the only way they're remembered? And more importantly, should we stop romanticizing time periods like the Antebellum south and the European medieval era and instead look at the historical atrocities that accompanied them? Should we be careful not to let church and state get entangled so that out-of-context religious rules never become deity-ordained laws? It's been almost a week and I still find myself wondering about this book. As the professor of that contemporary lit class always said, if you find yourself thinking about a movie days after watching it, you know it was good. I think the same thing goes for great novels.