[SPOILERS]
Preamble: Usually, I try to review books… to make an comprehensive argument for their merit and worth or lack thereof. In this case, however, it seems to be a somewhat pointless exercise. Collins’ trilogy thoroughly saturates the media these days, and with over 7000 reviews on Amazon, I’m unlikely to make a case that hasn’t been made before. If you want my opinion in a nutshell: they’re great. They’re flawed in various ways, sure, but the flaws are never worse than irritants, and the book certainly isn’t guilty of the most common charge; that it is derivative of earlier works. The story is sufficiently archetypal that the telling is more important than plot affinities, and The Hunger Games is well told. It is sparely written and brutal with a realism that belies its futuristic setting. Sometimes this brutality is painful. You should read it.
What I’d like to do instead of detailed review, however, is to talk about several features of the trilogy that struck me as significant and memorable. Specifically, I want to talk about The Hunger Games as an explicitly political work, its thematic density, and the messy and problematic third book. Since this is too long to fit into one blog entry, I’ll be doing this in three posts.
—–
MORE THAN A TWO-DIMENSIONAL LOVE TRIANGLE.
So I was going to make a case for thematic density in Hunger Games. That cascading questions from a variety of angles — through genre, allusion, political commentary — all make this a particularly rich experience that reaches deeper than the spare details about this dystopian future suggest. But this is an easy argument. Instead, I’m going to respond to a friend’s argument that a particular plot point of the novels is strictly status quo. It’s appropriate to rebut here because this plot point is, itself, a good example of thematic density.
Among the criticisms that Hunger Games receives from literary-minded people is that the characters are not particularly dynamic, and that the love-triangle between the three main protagonists is particularly weak. One line of criticism might state that a conventional teenage love-triangle detracts from the more original political and social commentary of the books. A more conventional critique would argue that such a prominent and conventional love-triangle, surrounded by the captivating discord of Panem, cannot hold tension, and therefore strains the reader’s interest. There are both good points and mistaken assumptions in these arguments. I’ll deal with the legitimate complaints first.
First, the love-triangle is flawed. Some of the flaws are structural. We meet Gale first, but only for a few moments in the first book. It’s easy to see him as a sort of Platonic ideal mate for Katniss, but this possibility is quickly swept away by the introduction of Peeta under much more dire circumstances. By the time we get back to Gale, Peeta has had a 350-page book to define himself through actions and words. In the second book, Gale gets considerably more face time, but he is upstaged again. It isn’t until the third book that the two characters are presented in such a way that the reader’s own process of comparison is in any way comparable to Katniss’. That is, she has been comparing the two all along because she has had similarly resonant (if circumstantially different) experiences with each of them. Whereas for the reader, Gale remains more or less an idea of a character, as opposed to the more organic presentation of Peeta. Collins is deliberate in her placement of Gale at the beginning, and at the way Katniss thinks back to him throughout her struggles, so it seems likely that she was aware of this problem. However, I don’t think that the resolution is sufficient.
The second major flaw in the love-triangle is in the way the characters themselves are portrayed. Katniss is the most supply drawn, not least because Collins uses the first-person narrative well, allowing her protagonist to both tell us about herself, and to accidentally reveal parts of herself she doesn’t fully understand or even recognize. Peeta is also well-rendered, but his devotion and idealism, his fundamental “goodness” is undisputed for so long that it’s easy for readers to be lulled into complacency. It is only in the third book, when Peeta is brainwashed, and we see him struggling to find and define his identity, that his perspective comes under scrutiny. But Gale is, once again, the weakest link. He possesses very specific opinions about predators and prey which makes his relationship to both Katniss and Peeta a source of interest. However, we see few signs of this until the third book, by which point many readers’ notions of the characters will already be fixed.
Those are the flaws, and they diminish the effectiveness of the love-triangle, not only as a relationship between characters we care about, but as an analogue for dueling views on the nature of justice in a violent society.
I don’t have to say much about “the relationship between characters we care about.” It isn’t particularly relevant whether the characters are two- or three-dimensional… as James Wood eloquently says in How Fiction Works, “many of the most vivid characters in fiction are monomaniacs.” Yet, we do want them to be vivid, and Gale, in particular, suffers from a lack of vividness until late in the game.
However, there’s a lot to say about the “analogue for dueling views on the nature of justice in a violent society,” and a good first question is, how on earth do these critics fail to see such an analogue, even when it is specifically acknowledged in the text? Not to be histrionic, but I think it derives in large part from latent classist notions about what genre fiction is not capable of as opposed to so-called literary fiction. Yes, one can observe that there is a conventionalized love-triangle in this trilogy that plays out predictably for careful observers. But how many literary short stories are wedded to the trope of the negligent alcoholic father? Is Madame Bovary any less great for dealing with your stereotypical banal infidelity? Is The Great Gatsby less important because all of its characters are two-dimensional, following their courses like trains along a track? Of course not! So if we’re going to indict The Hunger Games, let’s at least make sure our standards and apologies are uniform.
As for the analogue itself, the case itself is this. We learn very early on about Gale’s anger at the Panem autocracy:
“It’s to the Capitol’s advantage to have us divided among ourselves,” he might say if there were no ears to hear but mine… His rages seem pointless to me, although I never say so. It’s not that I don’t agree with him. I do. But what good is yelling about the Capitol in the middle of the woods?
Both circumstance and sentiment could not be more different when Peeta, hundreds of miles from home and on the eve of his probable death says:
“I don’t want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I’m not.”
This ethical dichotomy is skillfully balanced and, had the triangle been better presented, could have become a major point of tension between these three characters from the very beginning. Instead, while we get the interpersonal conflict from the beginning (Katniss is torn between public affection for Peeta and private longing for Gale, while both are mindful of this tension), the thematic tension emerges very, very slowly.
By the second book, ideological territory has been staked out, although views have not yet fully crystallized. Early on in the second book, Gale says:
“It can’t be about just saving us anymore. Not if the rebellion’s begun!” Gale shakes his head, not hiding his disgust with me.
His point of view is meant to generate sympathy, but this response to a child who has murdered and witnessed murder, who has lost friends and family and survived through desperate action, is as intentionally provocative. By the third book, Gale is the most enthusiastic rebel among the three main characters, a strident apologist on behalf of District 13 (a regime backing the rebel effort), with a punitive streak that weighs ever heavier in his decisions. He ultimately commits to a strategy of attack-without-quarter and views that the ends justify the means, and while these are ideas long-explored in literature, they have a particular life in this character.
Peeta’s perspective is different, his actions framed by his devotion to the people he cares about, most specifically Katniss. There is evidence of this in practically every exchange, but his evolving political consciousness fixates on mercy for the victim, not vengeance upon the oppressor. Which is why, in his own moment of rebellion, Peeta paints a mural of a 12-year old girl that was murdered in the first book. Moments later (and unaware of Peeta’s action), Katniss metaphorically murders one of the murderers. It’s a position between that held by Peeta and Gale.
Katniss herself vacillates throughout the second and third book. She’s inclined toward a pragmatic self-interest that extends to immediate friends and family, but feels that her unique position as the face of the rebellion obliges her to more active resistance. Thus the tension between these three protagonists not only determines the final outcome of their respective relationships, but of the whole political order of Panem. In the end, with the undisputed assistance of Gale, the rebel regime perpetrates atrocities as awful as those of the Capitol with catastrophic results for the main characters. As Katniss finally says, in the closing moments of the trilogy:
…what I need to survive is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.
The symmetry here is never abrasive, and this is, in the end, far from a status quo love-triangle. By the end of the third book, it has taken on a sophistication and resonance that is powerful, and ought to give pause to any critic inclined to dismiss the subtlety of genre fiction out-of-hand.