SPOILER ALERT…but since I don’t encourage the reading of the reviewed book, go ahead and be spoiled!
The juvenile fiction The Hunger Games trilogy‘s attempt at sketching a “groundbreaking” story of political revolution into more than just an unprofound sequence of horrible, futuristic, seemingly video game-inspired events falls dreadfully short of anything but being intensely captivating.
Katniss is an exasperating protagonist who thinks in sentence fragments and eventually comes to the realization that she’s not a very nice person. Furthermore, while all along she knows she is just a playing piece in the very apparent games of the harsh government, by the end of the third book she becomes aware that she’s also the pawn of rebel leaders.
In the first book, Katniss volunteers to replace her little sister who has been randomly selected to play in “the Capitol’s” greatest annual display-of-power entertainment event in which two children from each of the twelve districts fight to the gruesome death in a highly controlled “arena” that frequently proves itself yet another enemy, all in accordance to the game makers’ whims.
The trouble, she soon learns, is that her district’s other contestant, Peeta, happens to have always been madly in love with her. She struggles to please the games’ television audience–she knows that will bring in helps for winning–that is enthralled with their unfolding, violent love story that will necessarily, according to the rules of the game, leave but one victor. When all the other contestants bite the dust, however, Peeta and Katniss impulsively stand ready to kill themselves rather than each other. But if their poisonous berries are ingested, the Capitol will be left without a winner to celebrate, and so at the last second, the Capitol’s rule of one victor only is changed and both Katniss and Peeta are declared winners of the contest, to live forever in rare luxury, yes, but also, since they so forced the rule change–and on live TV, at that–as de facto enemies of the state.
In the second book, Katniss and Peeta are summoned away from their comfortable lives in Victor Village for an extra round held in honor of an anniversary of the games, in which they again are to be enemies. By the end of the story Katniss learns that she is the symbol of the rebel uprising-to-be–and that the game’s other players know this and are determined to keep her alive at their own expense, in the name of the rebellion. In spite of her naive distrust of the other contestants, her blind need to survive, and her determination that Peeta will be the victor (she knows he is much more worthy of life than she), Katniss and events work together so that the rebels successfully bring down the arena and be swooped to the rebels’ territory.
Finally, the third book details her participation in the revolution as occasional warrior and full-time mascot, her agonizing love for both Peeta and a childhood friend Gale, and finally her marriage.
If my shortening summarizations of the consecutive books say nothing else, I hope they make apparent the diminishing philosophical returns of reading the trilogy. My initial imaginative hopes while reading the first book–that somehow Katniss and Peeta would avoid participating in the society’s violence and instead creatively undermine the evil government’s games through redemptive means–rather quickly eroded away to a sorrowful resignation that in spite of Katniss’s reluctance to kill her contestants, her heartfelt connections with others of them, her naming the games for what they are, her reckless protestation of the killing even and especially by the rebels, and her mental anguish spawned by the gut-wrenching violence and injustice that surrounds her and steals from her close friends and dear family, there is, apparently, no serious possibility in author Suzanne Collins’ worldview for overthrowing a dictator without killing off buttloads of people, and even the puresque Katniss’ ultimate motivation throughout the third book is getting to kill the evil president.
Indeed, the plot not only wholly fails to avoid bloodshed, it also devolves into a list of absurd ways of killing people: Even though the rebel warriors are certainly vulnerable to everyday machine-gun fire (well, maybe except for Katniss, who has extravagant body armor), the booby traps on the streets range from waves of black gel, to spring-loaded nets webbed with piercing teeth, to streets that fold back and reveal pits filled with murderous beings.
In short, although fun to have read, Collins’ thrill-inducing trilogy neglects to provide what textual video game lovers would never think to ask for: fundamentally novel political revolution.
