The Hunger Games

This trilogy is a page turner, a  plot driven cliff hanger which reads like a movie script.  The reader finds the character of Katniss an unlikely heroine who has taken on the role of protector and provider for her mother and younger sister in a post-apocolyptic land that supports the surviving remnant of earth's humanity.  Katniss (named for an edible root) is the perfect young woman to carry the reader into the world of survival inside of a real game: kill or be killed, broadcast live and in full color, complete with wardrobe and make-up by the trendiest of designers.  She is not only beautiful and exotic when she is made over by her design team to render her camera-ready, she is opinionated, self-directed and an expert marksman with a bow and arrow. 

While comparisons to Disney World and the ancient Roman Colliseum with its bloody gladiator games are obvious, the parallels to reality television and moderns constant need for entertainment are also erily familiar. While reading the entire trilogy over a week, I found it annoyingly hard to put down.  It reminded me of the old radio shows which always ended with "stay tuned next week."  It is hard to get Katniss and her struggle to live out of your mind. 

If Suzzane Collins is trying to warn us to shut off the monitors and  return to the woods and beaches for our entertainment and sense of reality, she looses it in the glorification of winning at all costs, beating the programmer of the game.  When it is made into a movie, I suspect it will be sensual, gory and without any moral reflection whatsoever. 

It is the ultimate teen fantasy, one beautiful girl with power, talent, access to good looking males without the burden of sexual or personal committment, and no parental interference whatsoever.  The willingness of the author to brutally kill and kill in bloody detail on nearly every page is mentally numbing.  The heroine is gravely injured and put back together so many times that sleeping in hospital beds makes up for several pages every other chapter.  While the future cannot feed its people, they apparently have unlimited access to medical care without cost or disability. 

It is a horror story with mechanical monsters, genetic weaponry, poinsonings, fires, toxic gassing, vomitting, splurting blood and melting skin. Katniss and her male entourage acquire PTSD over and over again, yet never loose the ability to lead their communities in combat, film commercial ads and propoganda without givng up the makeup and wardrobe of the Hollywood type makeover professionals.  Even corpse are given a bit of lip gloss before camera crews film the nightly news.

I was bothered by the lack of moral reflection on either side of this conflict.  Absense of any sense of an eternal consequence or soul of the assorted victims makes killing to survive an easy choice that propels The Hunger Games forward.  In the end, the rushed disappointment (due to Collins' hurried tying up of loose ends) is indeed pale and shallow reflection for Katniss  after twice surviving The Hunger Games.