Because it has to go back to the library today, I finished the final book of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy yesterday. Mockingjay, itself, was probably my second favorite of the three (though it was probably the best of the three...it just didn't have the mystique of the first).
I won't write specifically about the third book and I will try my best not to spoil any plot points. It's not well-written enough to keep you going if you know the end.
The first book is currently in the process of film interpretation and will be coming to a theater near you sometime next summer. I'm looking forward to that and I'll probably go see it, but I already don't expect a great movie. The trilogy's biggest strength is the narrator's voice and no first person narrator has ever been captured well on film because the camera is the narrator, no matter the voiceover, and the limits of a character's perspective are never captured on film. I'm interested though, in what will be captured.
I'm not, however, just going to talk about a movie that isn't out. There is so much I could say about the trilogy but I'm not sure where to start. It was, at times, hard to get through because parts of it are predictable, parts of it are excrutiatingly simplistic and unimaginitive from a prose standpoint.
But parts of it are breathtaking and I couldn't have been more satisfied with the last 10 pages. The first 900 of the series are somehow worth it (though let me say that, no matter how it may sound, many of those really aren't so bad).
As a concept, it's a top 10 of the last 5 years. Basically, if you don't know much about it, something happened and most of the United States was turned into a series of 13 districts and one capital (aproximately Denver). At some point prior to the start of the first book (roughly 75 years and change), the districts revolted and lost to the capital. That's a little far fetched probably, but it "happened." As "punishment" the districts have to provide 2 children each year to fight to the death in the Hunger Games to prove that the capital is so far reaching even the children aren't safe. Amazingly, I'm actually not simplifying the motives in any of that, but it's not as "contrived in a 6 year old's mind" as it sounds, though it often dips into that. This is no measuredly sketched picture of human depravity ala The Lord of the Flies, and yet Collins is a better story teller than Golding. She's probably the worst writer I've devoted this much time to in probably my entire life, but she tells a compelling story. That's why I want to see the movie. Because a troupe of Hollywood talent can't make it feel as flat as Collins. Maybe I have too much faith in Hollywood. But, if you pick up a copy of the Catching Fire and read any single page out of context and flow, you'll blush at the forced dialogue, I promise.
As I said though, it is a good story, and I do indeed urge you to take the plunge. Once you cut past the badly pasted artifice of prose, you'll find a jewel of human heart, right near the end of the final book, that you can and should carry with you for the rest of your life. The trilogy shouldn't be a trilogy. It should be one book because the second book could be condensed to 25 pages. The market doesn't work that way and the demographic couldn't tolerate it, so I understand. But, in better hands, this story could be the best rebut to War and Peace I've ever read. That doesn't mean much to most of the world because most people haven't read War and Peace (including, I imagine, Suzanne Collins), but it's essentially the same story in a different setting, with a very different result. Somehow, Collins created a poorly written trilogy that fits inside the thrust of literary history in ways few novels actually do anymore (especially YA literature).
I was ultimately disappointed in the trilogy, but I couldn't be happier with the story and most especially the ending. If all truly is well that ends well, then the The Hunger Games knows few peers among contemporary novels. Because I don't believe in pithy, untested phrases, I don't believe that. But it is worthwhile, and that's something most readers need to know in a world where so few make the time it takes to really read anymore.
-Zack
i am so happy to know you have read the Hunger Games
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