By DAPHNE LEE
From Tots to Teens, StarMag
I’M guessing that by now everyone will have read Mockingjay (Scholastic Press, 398
pages, ISBN: 978-0439023511), the third and final book in Suzanne Collins’s The
Hunger Games Trilogy. If you haven’t and you dislike spoilers, stop reading at once.
I always read the final page of books first so I found out right away that Katniss and
Peeta end up together. And that they have two children. Ho-hum. The romance aspect
of the trilogy is the least interesting part of it and readers who focussed on Katniss’s
love life missed the point of the first two books.
For a start, surely Collins could have created men more worthy of her heroine than
Faithful Slave Peeta and Brave Warrior Gale. Next to the spectacularly flawed and
deeply conflicted Katniss, what choice did either male lead have except to assume
vaguely cartoonish shapes? Make no mistake, the trilogy has always had just one star,
never mind what the cover of the UK edition of The Hunger Games suggests.
Thankfully, neither lad gets much page-time in Mockingjay. When they appear, it’s
really for Katniss’s benefit, so that Collins can further explore what makes her heroine
tick.
The other character whom I think makes as forceful an impact as Katniss does is her
nemesis President Snow. His name and appearance, his cold-blooded machinations,
even his breath reeking of blood conjures a powerful and sinister vampiric presence,
even off the page.
And I think his death is one of the most spectacular in fiction – not, as you might
think, a violent, gory end, but madly, creepily laughing and dribbling blood, perhaps
trampled by crowds, perhaps choked on spit (“No one really cares.”), it’s still rather
brilliantly ghastly.
But that doesn’t come until the end. To get there took me, I have to admit, several
attempts. Finally, I finished the book by jumping around from chapter to chapter,
and then once from start to finish, and then re-reading a few choice paragraphs here
and there. I didn’t enjoy the violence of the first two books, and I didn’t enjoy it here
either. As a product of war, the killing is less shocking than when served up as a
warning-cum-entertainment, but it’s no less distasteful or upsetting.
The events that unfolded at the end of Catching Fire have left Katniss her even more
disillusioned and paranoid, and at the same time more vulnerable than ever before.
District 12, her home, has been destroyed, most of its citizens murdered. Those who
have survived the Capital’s wrath are relocated to district 13, where an underground
community has been biding its time, waiting to rebel against Capital’s oppressive
regime.
Katniss is, of course, chosen as the face of the rebellion, continuing the role she
unwittingly took on when she volunteered to replaced her sister as a contestant in the
Hunger Games. Aware that she is being used as a tool to spread and reinforce rebel
propoganda, Katniss is angry enough to comply, yet not so consumed by hate that she
ceases to be constantly plagued by doubts. The recurring question “Real or not real?”
asked by Collins’s main characters illustrates how beliefs, convictions and values are
constantly questioned and shaken in the nightmare scenarios mapped by war.
Mockingjay asks questions of its readers too. Does victory over a cruel government
justify the atrocities committed to achieve it? Do individual rights pale in comparison
to the greater good? Is there a place for compassion in war? How idealistic can one
remain in the face of unspeakable brutality?
I think it’s these questions and those posed by the first two books (about our
voyeuristic tendencies and susceptibility to media manipulation, the limits of human
endurance and the infinite measures of human hope), that will keep this trilogy on
book shelves for a long time to come.
Faithful Slave Peeta and Brave Warrior Gale. Next to the spectacularly flawed and
deeply conflicted Katniss, what choice did either male lead have except to assume
vaguely cartoonish shapes? Make no mistake, the trilogy has always had just one star,
never mind what the cover of the UK edition of The Hunger Games suggests.
Thankfully, neither lad gets much page-time in Mockingjay. When they appear, it’s
really for Katniss’s benefit, so that Collins can further explore what makes her heroine
tick.
The other character whom I think makes as forceful an impact as Katniss does is her
nemesis President Snow. His name and appearance, his cold-blooded machinations,
even his breath reeking of blood conjures a powerful and sinister vampiric presence,
even off the page.
And I think his death is one of the most spectacular in fiction – not, as you might
think, a violent, gory end, but madly, creepily laughing and dribbling blood, perhaps
trampled by crowds, perhaps choked on spit (“No one really cares.”), it’s still rather
brilliantly ghastly.
But that doesn’t come until the end. To get there took me, I have to admit, several
attempts. Finally, I finished the book by jumping around from chapter to chapter,
and then once from start to finish, and then re-reading a few choice paragraphs here
and there. I didn’t enjoy the violence of the first two books, and I didn’t enjoy it here
either. As a product of war, the killing is less shocking than when served up as a
warning-cum-entertainment, but it’s no less distasteful or upsetting.
The events that unfolded at the end of Catching Fire have left Katniss her even more
disillusioned and paranoid, and at the same time more vulnerable than ever before.
District 12, her home, has been destroyed, most of its citizens murdered. Those who
have survived the Capital’s wrath are relocated to district 13, where an underground
community has been biding its time, waiting to rebel against Capital’s oppressive
regime.
Katniss is, of course, chosen as the face of the rebellion, continuing the role she
unwittingly took on when she volunteered to replaced her sister as a contestant in the
Hunger Games. Aware that she is being used as a tool to spread and reinforce rebel
propoganda, Katniss is angry enough to comply, yet not so consumed by hate that she
ceases to be constantly plagued by doubts. The recurring question “Real or not real?”
asked by Collins’s main characters illustrates how beliefs, convictions and values are
constantly questioned and shaken in the nightmare scenarios mapped by war.
Mockingjay asks questions of its readers too. Does victory over a cruel government
justify the atrocities committed to achieve it? Do individual rights pale in comparison
to the greater good? Is there a place for compassion in war? How idealistic can one
remain in the face of unspeakable brutality?
I think it’s these questions and those posed by the first two books (about our
voyeuristic tendencies and susceptibility to media manipulation, the limits of human
endurance and the infinite measures of human hope), that will keep this trilogy on
book shelves for a long time to come.
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