The Werewolf essays on classic children’s books focusses this week on Suzanne Collins’ trilogy about war’s on children
True, it may seem weird to try and warn teenagers about the horrors of war by writing them a story about teenagers who kill each other in a TV reality show. Nine times out of ten, you’d end up with yet another example of our violence-soaked culture, rather than a cautionary tale.
So all credit to author Suzanne Collins for pulling it off with her Hunger Games trilogy. The anti-war message embedded in the narrative is unmistakable, and impressively true to her subject. To remain credibly on message, Collins is not averse to killing off one or two of her best-loved characters without much in the way of a prior warning.
The trilogy’s central figure is a 16 year old girl called Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic version of the United States called Panem. Everyday life in Panem’s hi-tech Capitol – which has every medical and technological marvel known to humanity – is vastly different from the struggle for subsistence in the twelve Districts under the thumb of the Capitol.
To underline the Capitol’s power, Panem holds an annual ritual known as the Reaping, in which two adolescents (one male, one female) are chosen at random to take part in the Hunger Games – which is a wildly popular televised reality contest in which the selected teenagers are required to fight each other to the death.
Viewers can sponsor competitors and send in packages of food, medicine, tools and weapons to help their favourite contestant win the contest. To spice up the proceedings, the Capitol’s game-makers also regularly send in mutant animals, and can alter the weather conditions inside the vast arena.
From survival, to rebellion
The first book in the trilogy is the most straightforward in that its main focus is the Hunger Games contest, while the later books are about the rebellion against the Panem dictatorship. Katniss gets involved in the Hunger Games only after she volunteers to replace her young sister Prim, who was unexpectedly selected to represent the mining region that the Everdeen family call home, in what is plainly meant to be the Appalachian mountains.
Peeta Mellark, the baker’s son who gets selected as the male representative from the same District, has loved Katniss from afar since childhood, and a favour done to her family has left her in his debt.
On publication in 2008, The Hunger Games was accused of being a rip-off of the Japanese action movie Battle Royale, which also features a televised fight to the death among teenage schoolkids . Well, so did the 1987 Schwarzenegger science fiction movie The Running Man, and the 2001 film Section 7.
In response, Collins has cited much older, classical Greek influences on her work, such as the story of the Minotaur – in which seven pairs of male and female youngsters were ritually offered each year to the Beast, before it was finally killed by Theseus. Spartacus, the slave who led a rebellion against Roman rule was also Collins said, an inspiration for how the storyline of The Hunger Games evolved in her mind.
Finally, Collins told the New York Times that the basic premise came to her one night when she was channel-surfing, and she happened to flip from a reality-television competition to news footage of the war in Iraq.
Lone wolves are dead ends
The plagiarism accusations were always pretty facile. One of the strikingly original things about The Hunger Games is the way it shows that even in a contest where there can be only one winner, survival is utterly dependent on the ability to form alliances, however temporary they may be.
Lone wolf protagonists can survive for a while – such as the contestant called Foxface in the first book – but they don’t prosper for very long. (Strategic alliances are only a fleeting and secondary aspect of the Battle Royale storyline.) The emphasis that Collins places on the need for collaboration within a winner-take-all game is fascinating, given that Katniss’s life as a hunter and archer could easily have equipped her to be a lone wolf heroine.
Initially, the need for collaboration is portrayed as a necessary response to the power of privilege, given that some contestants from wealthier areas arrive at the Game possessing an unfair advantage in physical strength, education and training.(They are called “Careers” in the text.)
Only co-operation among those with limited resources can offset the advantages enjoyed by the Careers. Again, this is an interesting subtext. The world we live in tends to (a) glorify individual achievement while (b) downplaying the myriad advantages in life enjoyed by the children of the privileged.
The interactive nature of the Hunger Games is also presented in a sophisticated fashion. Katniss and Peeta can’t succeed strictly on their own abilities, even after they’ve begun to co-operate. They survive only through manipulating the viewing audience by role-playing a romantic relationship that delights the audience into sponsoring them. Oh, how they come to adore those two star-crossed lovers from District 12!
Yet in the process, the romantic ruse begins to confuse Katniss as to her own real feelings about Peeta. There is nothing like this level of interplay between actors and viewers, media factoids and inner realities in the Battle Royale film. Ultimately, it is the power derived from this romantic artifice that enables Katniss to survive, and to eventually become a political threat to the regime.
Even when Katniss does finally ally herself with the rebellion against the Capitol in book three, she quickly comes to realise that once again, it is her artificial, media-constructed identity that is of more use to the rebellion than her own real life contributions. In sum, the Hunger Games books contain a complex, shifting commentary on the interplay between real and media modulated identities, and this thread runs through the entire story.
The power of self-deception
For a blockbuster teen adventure, this message in The Hunger Games is also subversive. The book is explicit about depicting political power as something that’s bestowed by a fickle and credulous audience – whose responses have been manipulated by a media owned by people who in turn, become ensnared by the rules of the media game they have created.
Katniss is shown to be conscious of her own shortcomings in this respect. In the second book Catching Fire in particular, her job is to carry out actions that have meanings about which she is being deliberately kept in the dark.
As her mentor Haymitch finally tells her, the rebel leadership decided that she’d do a much better job if she wasn’t made aware of the actual context for her actions. Unfortunately, this means the reader has been kept in the same boat, too. So much so that my heart sank a little near the end of Catching Fire (p.464) when Haymitch has to take Katniss aside, sit her down and tell her (and the reader) exactly what the heck has been going on for the previous 200 pages.
Life After Wartime
It goes without saying that even fictional female characters don’t deserve to be defined by the men in their lives. As the saviour of Panem, you’d think that Katniss – who is only 18 or 19 at the end of the uprising – would have had any number of life options, including the freedom to use being alone as a chance to take stock, and to heal. In effect though, Collins offers Katniss only two options. At the time, the Internet almost broke itself in half as everyone and their dog weighed in on the relative merits/demerits of Peeta vs Gale..
While being a member of Team Gale, I think the more interesting aspect of the triangle is how it relates to Collins’ conclusions about the nature of war. Yes, war is hell: we can all agree on that. But the moral equivalence that Collins draws between Snow (the Panem dictator) and Alma Coin (the rebel leader) is IMO, a superficial way of loading the dice.
Yes, you do have to be careful to ensure that yesterday’s liberators do not become tomorrow’s oppressors. But the end result of Collins deliberate blurring of the lines is that Gale’s political radicalism ends up being linked uncertainly (and unfairly) with the death of a beloved member of the Everdeen family.
What I’m getting at is that the conclusion of the Hunger Games effectively rules out the possibility of a morally imperative political rebellion. (It also short-changes the people who died in the liberation of Panem.) Obviously, even a just war is usually a bloody affair, in which the innocent suffer. Yet by the same token, there are cases where the aftermath of war (e.g. the defeat of the Nazi regime) leaves the world demonstrably better off, compared to what went before. Panem is such a case.
No doubt, Mockingjay’s concluding tragedy and the PTSD from which Katniss is suffering put a question mark over Gale, and made Peeta’s unconditional devotion a welcome refuge. Yet hopefully, the PTSD would not be eternal. At which point, the limitations of Peeta (who knows full well he is not in her league) would become more apparent.
I know, I know, they’re fictional characters, not real people. But it is still worth considering….once the fighting stops, what does a fighter do? Rather than busying herself with the Hunger Games prequels, the more interesting challenge for Suzanne Collins would be to write a sequel about what happens to the Gale Hawthornes of the world, in peacetime.
The Life
Collins, now 63, spent well over a decade of her working life in creating storylines for children’s television TV shows, in everything from Clifford’s Puppy Days to Wow Wow Wubzy! Reportedly, she was raised within a military family who moved frequently during her childhood. In her mid 20s, she began her writing career in children’s television. Collins was 41 years old when her first book for children was published. As the New York Times put it :
Collins’s move from writing about an oversize red dog to writing about weaponry and military strategy may seem unexpected, but she was falling back on years of informal schooling on the subject of war. Her grandfather was gassed in World War I, and her uncle sustained shrapnel wounds in World War II. Some of Collins’s earliest memories are of young men in uniform drilling at West Point, where her father, who later made lieutenant colonel, was on loan from the Air Force, teaching military history.
In 1968 the family moved to Indiana. It was the year Collins turned 6. It was also the year her father left to serve in Vietnam. War was a favourite topic for her father; and war, she understood at a young age, determined her family’s fate.
Absent fathers have been pivotal elements in Collins’ published fiction to date. At the start of The Hunger Games, Katniss’ father has been killed a few years before in a mine explosion, leaving her to provide for the family.
Collins told the NYT that her father returned from Vietnam burdened with nightmares, which dogged him for the rest of his life. As a child, she would waken to the sound of him crying out in the night. Similarly, much is made in the first book of Katniss’s nightmares, caused by her experiences during the Games.
Collins has not encouraged allegorical readings of her books. As the NYT astutely concluded, “In The Lord of the Flies, the children are in an amoral free fall; [but] in The Hunger Games, young people, even murderous ones, are for the most part innocents, creations of adults’ cruelty or victims of adult weakness in the face of power.” For good reason, other characters explicitly comment (in Catching Fire, pages 259- 260 in particular) on the innocence that Katniss projects.
As someone almost devoid of guile, Katniss acts in her own defence, and in order to defend people she loves, or for whom she feels compassion. Everything else about the world is still something of a mystery to her. In this and a few other respects, she’s a convincing 16 year old.
Some fans of the books had worried that this quality of naivete would be sacrificed in the film, given that the then 21 year old Jennifer Lawrence had been chosen for the role. In fact, Lawrence had already proven herself in this setting. Her Hollywood breakthrough had been in the indie film Winter’s Bone, in which she played a 17 year old girl searching for her drug dealer father, amidst his creepy associates in the Ozark Mountains.
Like Katniss, Lawrence played a teenager in Winter’s Bone who is left prematurely in charge of her family. Ultimately, what made Katniss Everdeen such an interesting culture hero – and a marked improvement over say, Bella in Twilight – is that she was not the tremulous prey of a brooding male anti-hero, waiting to be bitten by the power of love and sex.
Instead (and in an interesting gender role reversal) the action hero in the Hunger Games is female, while the two thinly drawn bimbos hanging around the plot and vying for the hero’s affections, are both blokes. Not that Collins was much interested in focussing on the hormonal turmoil of her main characters. “I don’t write about adolescence,” she told the NYT. “I write about war. For adolescents.” One has to respect the way she went about bringing home the horrors of war to her readers, young and old.
Footnote: In the wake of the initial Hunger Games trilogy, Collins has published two prequels that – while not devoid of interest – do read mainly like fan service, and they add little to what has gone before. Did we really need to know why President Snow became a villain, or what made Haymitch turn to the bottle?
Even so, the better of the two prequels – 2025’s Sunrise On The Reaping – does repeat one of the recurring strengths of these books. Collins is exceptionally good at conveying the sense of dislocation felt by the children during the interval between them being wrenched from the familiar routines of home, and being pushed out into the arena, towards the slaughter that awaits them there.
The preceding rituals of training and media appearances may fill in the time, but they do little to dispel the creeping feelings of dread about what is to come. It takes real insight to recognise that sense of impending horror, and real skill to convey it.
Previous essays in this series: The Moomins by Tove Jansson; Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; Badgers Parting Gifts by Susan Varley; The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford; Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh; The Indian in The Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks; The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper; The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi; Abel’s Island by William Steig; Mrs Frisby And The Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien; Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt.