The Hunger Games: Why do we love misery?

Like most sensible people, I love to read.  While I’d give anything a go, if you’re familiar with some of these entries you’ll know the stuff I read the most: Stephen Donaldson, Brandon Sanderson and similar.  The bigger, more involved and more complex the better.  Give me huge, over-reaching themes set against backdrops of wars, politicking and struggles for the very soul of humanity, that feature huge casts of varied characters.  Give me Martin, give me Jordan, give me Herbert and give me Tolkien.  Let me get lost in detailed worlds and hundreds of thousands, no, millions of words.  But give me something else as well.  Give me hope.  Give me a reason to root.  Give me a happy ending.  Or, if not happy, exactly, then something to make the emotional investment worthwhile.  Basically, what this amounts to, is that I do not like them to be too realistic.

If someone accused me of being a pessimist, I’d be hard pushed to deny it with any level of credibility.  While our species is capable of some of the most incredibly wondrous and beautiful things, our talent for prejudice and discrimination knows no bounds.  We find it hard to empathise, to care about much beyond our immediate circle of friends and loved ones.  Not all of us, clearly, but many of us.  We hate all too easily.  This is why I want something slightly more positive in the stories I read.  I want to read about a humanity worth saving.

The thing that has prompted this whole train of thought is my recent reading of The Hunger Games trilogy.  *BY THE BY, THIS POST CONTAINS HUGE SPOILERS, SO IF YOU DON’T WANT THE ENDING RUINED, STOP READING AND COME BACK AFTER YOU’VE READ IT*  You’d be forgiven for thinking, as I did, that this is a series jumping on the back of the Twilight phenomenon.  The popularity of the series is almost a direct result of Twilight fans looking around for another fantastical horror-tinged series told from the point of view of a teenage girl.  The back of the books carry a hearty recommendation from the talent-vacuum herself, Stephenie Meyer.  Everything about it screams bandwagon-jumper.  Eventually, I was told enough times that it is not (mostly from Empire magazine and not Twilight fans because, well, who can trust a Twilight fan?), that I grasped the nettle and decided to give it a try.

While it is much more simplistic in terms of plot, characterisation and language than I generally prefer (it is meant for teens after all), it is undeniably well written.  Incredibly, I was brought almost literally to tears in the opening pages, when Kat volunteers to replace her little sister Prim in the games (the Hunger Games of the title, where children of the lower classes are forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of the privileged – it is hard to miss the heavy-handed criticism of our love of talent-based reality TV).  It is shockingly moving, and more than enough to convince me of its infinite superiority to the sparkly vampire guff it gets lumped together with.  Nothing else in the series matches that moment for triggering such a raw visceral emotional response; not Rue, not Peeta, not Gale.  The rest of it is a fine read – easy to follow, faced-paced and full of (sometimes really rather gruesome) action, heroics, horror and derring-do to escape seemingly impossible situations.

However.  The ending.  I despise the ending.  Not because it isn’t well-conceived and impressively executed.  But because it is one of the most pessimistic endings I have ever read.  It skews far too close to the reality I wish to escape from.  It goes to great lengths to point out that in war, your greatest allies are often no better or worse than your bitterest enemies.  Everybody is trying to kill people.  Killing people is a really shitty thing to do, and Katniss, the girl at the centre seems to be one of the only people capable of realising this and is punished relentlessly for it.  While she doesn’t suffer quite as much as Morn Hyland (Morn Hyland is the lead character in Stephen Donaldson’s Gap Sequence and is a character that suffers more than any other fictional character I have ever come across – so much so it almost completely ruins the series), she is, by the end, no more than a shell of a human, unable to take joy in anything.

*HERE COME THE SPOILERS* While enduring great hardship, Kat just about remains a whole person through most of the story, until the leader of the rebellion (who is supposedly on the same side as Kat) deliberately engineers the horrific fiery death of Prim with the sole purpose of breaking Kat to secure her own power.  It is a despicable thing to do, but certainly not outside the realms of believability, and it underlines the point about both opposing sides in a war being equally capable of atrocity.  In the current climate of celebrating every member of our armed forces as unquestionable heroes despite many of them being, in the words of the late, great, Bill Hicks, “a bunch of hired fuckin’ killers”, it is a particularly bold narrative choice.
Unfortunately, it is deadly for the story, and this stems from the opening scenes described above when Kat volunteers to replace Prim to keep her safe.  The whole point of Kat’s actions in all of the books, the reason she does what she does, is, more than anything, to protect Prim.  When she fails in that and Prim burns, it isn’t as emotional as you might think.  It has the opposite effect.  It makes you stop caring about Kat and her cause.  If the writer is willing to take even Prim from her in such a terrible way, then what is the point in investing emotionally in her at all?  I understand the point made, I do.  I even agree with it.  But it ruins this series.

To make it worse, there is a passage near the end, just after Prim goes up in flames and Kat herself is on the edge of death that describes Kat as being on a watery surface.  Above her all the people she loved that have died are birds soaring through the sky heading to some undisclosed but easy to guess destination.  Kat is unable to follow them and is instead being dragged under the surface by terrible clawed things representing the people she hates who are dead.  The bird that was Prim tries desperately to save her, but cannot and eventually has to let Kat go under to be clawed and shredded.  What this says to me is that even in death, the only thing that awaits Kat is an eternity in hell.  At a point earlier on, in the midst of a desperate battle to end the oppression of the lower classes, Kat murders an unarmed civilian to stop them raising the alarm.  This is her fate thanks to that instinctive action.  Suzanne Collins must hate humanity with a passion few can muster to give her heroine such a desolate ending.

The so-called happy ending, describing Kat getting together with one of only a few resolutely decent characters and having children rings utterly hollow and is tempered by Kat’s overwhelming fear for them.  This is not due to poor writing; on the contrary - it feels entirely right for the character and completely intentional on the author’s part.  Some stories have bittersweet endings – see the final pages of The Lord of the Rings, or Stardust.  Some have a devastating climax that manage to strengthen the story and wring the emotions – see the brilliant and wrenching The Book Thief or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and some have a cheap gag designed to annoy readers – step forward Stephen King’s Dark Tower.  The Hunger Games is just resolutely pessimistic at the expense of almost all reader satisfaction, and while the author’s point is strongly made and keenly felt, much of the enjoyment is sucked out of the experience.  It is a shame that such a well conceived story leaves such a bad taste in the mouth.