Just another WordPress.com weblog

The Hunger Games is pretty good. I know that description is inelegant for a book review, but its been a while since I’ve written a book review and I’m trying to get back into the swing of it.

In case you’ve been living under a rock and have no idea what the Hunger Games is about, the plot introduction follows.

Katniss Everdene, a girl living in a nation formed after ours was destroyed in an unnamed cataclysm watches as her sister is selected to participate in an annual blood sport tournament in which twelve boys and twelve girls are forced to battle to the death and because her sister is twelve and has no chance whatsoever of winning Katniss volunteers to take her place.

The premise is neither new or complicated but Suzanne Collins fidelity to it serves the novel well. The novels biggest strength is its plot, by chapter three Katniss is already on the train to the capital City of Panem, the nation that replaced the United States. Also by chapter three, all of the major characters have been introduced.

There are two love interests, the first is Katniss’s hunting partner who gets little screen time as he is not selected as part of the hunger games, and the second is the boy from her town who is selected, and whom Katniss may have to kill. These love interests benefit from the strong characterization which is found throughout the novel so that even though they are stereotypical bad and good boys respectively they both are three dimensional. It also helps the dark atmosphere of the novel that she’s going to have to try and kill one of them. There is also a drunken mentor who spends his first few appearences wasted and indifferent to whether or not the people he’s mentoring survive.

The novel isn’t exactly a character study as its more focused on story, but Collins does a good job with the first person narrator of Katniss. She’s been raised in the poorest of the twelve districts that make up the nation of Panem and thus is hard bitten and used to violence and struggle, but has managed to hang onto her humanity enough to be horrified at many aspects of her society which allows her to tell the reader what he needs to know, while also freaking out when she sees people die in front of her. This allows her to kill people and remain sympathetic.

The story moves at a fast clip, only slowing down every once in a while for flashbacks to earlier times in Katniss’s childhood which serve to flesh out a few of the characters by showing them in a context which doesn’t involve a bloody battle to the death.

For a book about twenty-four teenagers trying to kill each other, its not as violent as it could be, and the bleakest aspects of the dystopian society Collins has created are handled with discretion so that the book is appropriate for younger teenagers. The glossing over of sex and gratuitous violence is handled perfectly, however, so at no point does it feel like Collins was afraid of the subject matter she decided to write about, she implies with a few details what some authors would spend pages belaboring, and in that one way the censorship imposed upon her by the demographic she’s writing for benefits the novel. OK, that made up for pretty good, right?

The book can be roughly divided into three parts, before the hunger games, which is the name of the blood sport, the hunger games themselves, and the aftermath. The first part works at ramping up the tension so that even though I was pretty sure Katniss lives because there are two more books after the first I was nervous that she might die at any time once the hunger games started, and Collins does a good job of never letting the reader forget that death’s always right around the corner.

The Hunger Games are a reminder to the citizens of Panem that rebellion will not be tolerated, they are supposed to be punishment for an earlier rebellion. They are broadcast on TV like a reality show, and the book satirizes how our reality shows work. Katniss has a stylist who makes her look pretty for pre hunger games interviews, and the members of the capital see nothing wrong with watching people brutally kill each other.

The interviews themselves resemble the fluff pieces on good morning America, and the early part of the novel keeps showing us almost banal preparations for the contest to come. The contrast between getting makeup done and trying to shine on TV as compared to what’s coming is unreal. Because the novel is first person we stick with Katniss all the time she’s being prepped to die, and Collins does a great job of showing the stress that would result from being in such a situation.

Once the hunger games start, there’s a nice implied contrast between how bloody and violent the contest is for those involved in it and the idea that its entertainment for other people is made to be properly discomforting.  Teenagers die left and right and some of the deaths resonate. Given how short the book is, making miner characters vivid enough  that the reader cares about them when they die is a mark in the books favor.

The world building is balanced perfectly with plot. Katniss will mention facts that are important in passing several chapters before we need to know them, but at no time does the book get bogged down in tons of stuff that is irrelevant to the story. When the facts later come into play they’ve been introduced recently enough in the book that you remember them and its always nice to see how careful bits of exposition are important later on.

As more contestants die, Collins shows how awful it would be to have to participate in such a contest and she gets extra points for making the authoritarian and bloodthirsty society of Panem believable, everyone in the capital endorses the Hunger Games and enjoys watching them, but few of these characters strike the reader as evil, instead they are all misguided and ill informed.

Whoever decided this book would make a great movie has a wonderful eye for this type of thing as one of the books strengths is the way in which Collins draws you in through the settings she conjures up. The capital is decetant and foreign and very flash bang science fiction, while all the characters that populate it are believably human. The arena that the games take place in is dangerous and without comfort and the hunger games themselves which take up the largest part of the novel are well written. The battle fatigue and stress and fear that’s inherent in the concept of having to try and shoot someone in the face with a bow and arrow never abate or grow stale or repetitive.

The best illustration of Collins’s skill as a novelist work is that Katniss is a product of her society. While she’s against the Hunger Games, especially once she’s in them, she isn’t one of those unbelievable characters who lives in a dystopia and has an instinctual sense that everything about it is wrong. She reacts to the cruelty inflicted on her and her family, not on the cruelty inflicted upon the society as a hole. As the book continues and Katniss sees people dying all around her for no reason, the stirrings of a political conchisness begin to show themselves, but this evolution is naturalistic, and isn’t ever ham handedly done through pages of preachy monologue.

If you like science fiction or adventure, or books that keep you turning pages, give this a try. You won’t be disappointed.

One final thing. Some people have noted rightly that the Hunger Games is quite similar to a novel called Battle Royale. The only thing both novels share is that they are both about a reality show where kids try and kill each other. Battle Royale, however is a novel consumed with blood, whereas the Hunger Games works so well because it starts days before the first drop of blood is ever spilled and the comparison between the two is like comparing Dracula and Salem’s Lot. Simmilar but by no means the same book.