Book Review (Fiction) : The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins

Scholastic 2008                                               374 Pages          

Dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction used to be a staple of the heyday of the Cold War during the 60s and 70s when nuclear Armageddon seemed to be a very real possibility. As one of SF’s great humorists, the late Robert Sheckley (1928-2008) saw the satirical possibilities in such scenarios – and explored them in a loose trilogy; Hunter/Victim, The 10^th Victim and Victim Prime.

Sheckley posited a future Earth ravaged by man’s thoughtless greed, where the spectre of all-out total war is kept in abeyance by televised violent to-the-death hunts in which teams of sponsored killers alternate as both “hunters” and “victims”. This premise probably influenced both  Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale and Suzanne Collins’ cult YA novel The Hunger Games; but with teenaged protagonists and sans Sheckley’s dryly sardonic black humour.

That’s one of the things missing in The Hunger Games with it’s overly reverential treatment of its heroine, Katniss Everdeen, presented as a “Mary Sue” without a flicker of irony. This paragon’s lily-white perfection is artificially maintained by the author throughout. Unnaturally, everyone automatically adores her to the extent of being willing to die for her – even the supposedly oppressive Capitol practically worships the ground she walks on!

Whatever happened to the survival instinct? Katniss never realistically kills just to save herself; whenever she takes a life, it is always accidental, a mercy killing or justified as retaliation for child murder. She conveniently doesn’t have to make any hard decisions that brute survival would reasonably dictate, she never has to wrestle with her conscience or struggle with her principles.

Apart from the characters being somewhat flat and the flawed plot being somewhat predictable with a clichéd love triangle, the implausible central premise of The Hunger Games also poses problems. The nation of Panem, formed from post-apocalyptic North America, consists of a wealthy Capitol region surrounded by 12 poorer districts. Early in its history, a failed rebellion led by a now-vanished 13th district against the Capitol resulted in the creation of an annual televised event known as the Hunger Games. In punishment each district must yield one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 through a lottery system to participate in gladiatorial-style games. The "tributes" are chosen during the annual Reaping and are forced to fight to the death, leaving only one survivor to claim victory.

The Hunger Games depicts a particularly sick form of child exploitation; it this wasn’t bad enough, the games are utterly corrupt in many other ways, with public betting on the slaughter  of children and sponsors being able to rig outcomes. This child-killing tournament has been continuing for three generations (the 74^th games are central to the book) and no one has risen in protest against this atrocity before. Would a depopulated post-apocalyptic world so readily sacrifice its children, who represent the best possible investment in the future? Would parents so passively give up their children to torture and death, decade after decade? And the Capitol doesn’t even have to invoke religion or law to justify this  flagrant barbarism!

After recovering from the unspecified disaster that caused an environmental apocalypse, would a society at bare subsistence levels realistically have the surplus and resources to stage such elaborate televised reality shows? Wouldn’t industrial production of weapons and other equipment (floating TV cameras!) essential to the working of the enforcers of the Capitol be impossible?  If the land had made enough of a recovery to support the forest teeming with game and berries that Katniss and Gale forage in, couldn’t it also support kitchen garden plots that would alleviate some of the starvation depicted in The Hunger Games?  This was done quite successfully during World War 2 by a small island nation whose food supplies were affected by German U-boats that disrupted merchant shipping bearing provisions. The wartime British also managed rationing of scarce food resources rather better than fictional Panem!   

In her laboured way, Suzanne Collins appears to be trying to address big issues such as the corrupting influence of extreme reality shows, divided loyalties, the dangers of power and celebrity, etc. etc but in flat, graceless prose with a first-person narrator singularly lacking in self-awareness. And the fact that narrator is Katniss Everdeen herself means that her survival is a given, killing any suspense.

All in all, post-apocalyptic future dystopias have been done far better elsewhere, as in, most notably, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Chrysalids by John Wyndham and  The Death Of Grass by John Christopher. Even P D James’ overrated The Children Of Men was better than this!