Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

[coraa]

Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games), by Suzanne Collins

This is the third (and final) book in the "Hunger Games" series, and as such it's difficult to talk about without spoilers for Mockingjay, and almost impossible to talk about without spoilers for the prior books. So I'll keep the outside-the-spoiler-cut brief: I still think this trilogy is worth reading, but this final book left me feeling curiously deflated. I won't say it was a bad book, or that I didn't enjoy it, but I really, really wanted to love it and I... didn't. Couldn't. I liked it okay, but after the lead-up, it left me feeling disappointed.



So, spoilery: I confess, the first thing that jarred me was starting the book so long after the end of Catching Fire. When the book begins, Katniss has settled in at District Thirteen, and has become disenchanted with it. My first thought was: why not show us that: Katniss' grief, her hope and fear, her slow realization that Thirteen is better than the arena but is certainly not paradise?

I'm sorry to say, that started a trend that explains why I'm disappointed in the book: Katniss doesn't do much, and we don't see her growth and change and the way she learns. Indeed, she spends the first half of the book, at least, in a grey hopelessness, skipping trainings and classes and sleeping in supply closets.

And, well, here's the thing: I loved The Hunger Games because I loved Katniss, her strength and fire, the way she genuinely cared for people (Prim, Rue, Gale, her mother, even Peeta), the way the world tried to seize her agency from her and she took it back in a defiant and genuinely dramatic show: that if they would not let her live on her own terms then she would die on her own terms.

And that Katniss just... wasn't there. The Katniss of the first half of Mockingjay seemed to believe that everyone was equally corrupt, so why bother with anything? Seemed to believe the government when it told her she was just a pawn. Seemed not to want to, well... to bother. She spent most of her time just doing, well, nothing. And when obstacles were thrown in her path, like Peeta's hijacking, she just rolled over and gave up.

That was not my Katniss. And tearing the heart out of Katniss meant tearing the heart out of the book, for me.

I've heard arguments that Katniss' inability and unwillingness to do anything was realistic because Katniss was (understandably) traumatized. But here's the thing: for one thing, PTSD doesn't always take the same form, and there's no reason that traumatized!Katniss had to equal passive!Katniss or hopeless!Katniss. And choosing that particular symptom of trauma felt to me like a bad dramatic choice, because (and yes, I keep harping on this) it left us with a main, POV character who spent all her time sleeping in supply closets.

And one of the upshots of that was that we heard, rather than saw, much of the action. Which is always frustrating.

For another thing, just because 'hopeless and bored' is how your main character is feeling, that doesn't mean that that's how you have to make your audience feel. There's a brilliantly funny scene in Kushner's Swordspoint, in which the POV character is watching a deadly dull play... and yet Kushner doesn't bore us: she writes the scene extremely funny. (I seem to remember that Richard spent the entire boring play trying to figure out whether the parrot on stage was alive or stuffed.) Obviously 'screamingly funny' would be the wrong mood here, but 'bored and depressed' was not a terribly compelling mood to inflict on the reader, either.

Around the halfway point, it picked up, as Katniss actually started doing things. But by then I was disenchanted with this girl whose goals were all selfish (Thirteen was nearly as bad as Panem, you see, so why bother with anything bigger than yourself?) and who had no patience at all (come on, expecting Peeta to recover in forty-eight hours is ludicrous, and she should have known that). It was just. I don't know. It felt like the narrative tore the heart out of Katniss, but doing so also tore the heart out of the narrative.

And then, of course, the ending. I've always been nominally more Team Peeta than Team Gale (because love seemed to make Peeta vulnerable, but it made Gale demanding, and I don't find demanding attractive at all), but I'm mostly Team Sweetheart, You Don't Need To Pick A Love Interest Right This Second. And the ending, in which Katniss is hit with the massive trauma of losing Prim (which was the thing that started the whole plot int he first place!) and then there's a timeskip and she's married to Peeta... it didn't work for me.

I would rather have skipped Catching Fire, had Mockingjay be the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy, and then had a third book in which Katniss dealt with the pain and horror of losing Prim and recovered to the point where I could actually buy her marrying Peeta.

Add to this that Collins appears to think that all politics are evil, and that there's no real point in overthrowing the government because the next government will be just as bad, and... yeah. I was left deflated, not so much emotionally wrung out as just empty of feeling about the book.

Sigh. I don't want to make it sound like it was a terrible book. One of Collins' strengths is creating nuanced and three-dimensional secondary characters, and this book continued that trend. And it certainly was realistic that everything wasn't sunshine and roses. It just... I don't know. It did not satisfy me, as a reader, I guess.

Which is a shame, because I really did want to love it.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

So, I totally read spoilers for this (not just yours) but because I haven't read the book, I was unable to argue with all the people saying "It would be unrealistic for Katniss to be active, because she's traumatized and that makes you passive."

I've heard arguments that Katniss' inability and unwillingness to do anything was realistic because Katniss was (understandably) traumatized. But here's the thing: for one thing, PTSD doesn't always take the same form, and there's no reason that traumatized!Katniss had to equal passive!Katniss or hopeless!Katniss. And choosing that particular symptom of trauma felt to me like a bad dramatic choice, because (and yes, I keep harping on this) it left us with a main, POV character who spent all her time sleeping in supply closets.

Yes! Traumatization takes many forms! It can also make people inbued with manic or self-destructive energy, for instance. Or it can not hit until long, long after the crisis is over.

Katniss struck me, in the first two books, as very much the type of person who grits her teeth and perseveres and compartmentalizes and denies, and could take an enormous amount of trauma without it having a visible (to outsiders) effect until a very long time afterward. As in years.

Seriously, sleeping in supply closets? I had heard people complaining that she spends a long time drugged and in the hospital - can BOTH be true?

[coraa.livejournal.com]

They're both true. Right after she comes out of the arena, she spends a lot of time in the hospital (understandably, because she's had a bad time of it). Then after that, partly because of residual concussion but mostly because she feels hopeless and hates everything, she ignores the rigid schedules of Thirteen (they live in underground bunkers, and therefore have fairly strict rules to ensure best use of the space and to make sure that they, oh, continue to have enough clean water and edible food) in order to take naps in places people won't find her, like the supply closet. Then there are a few more incidents (someone tries to strangle her is one, I forget the others) that land her in the hospital, and once she recovers, she's back to 'sleeping in supply closets and resenting everything.'

It was baffling! She was so determined and angry and proactive before!

And I reject with extreme prejudice the idea that she had to be passive because of the trauma. Sure, that's one possible symptom, but it's not the only one. And narratively I think it was a dreadful choice.

Later she actually decided she wanted to be active (she wanted to kill President Snow personally, rather than let the other rebels do it), and was all snitty because they were like, "No, you've been skipping military training in order to sleep in supply closets, you can't go." So she gets an exemption, but it was too late for me, because I was like, "Right on, Thirteen! Giving up and sleeping on the floor all day actually has consequences!" Only, not.

Sigh. And I loved Katniss too, I did, I loved the books because I loved her, and then she was replaced by someone who was dull and depressing.

I am not the someone who wanted to puncture a hole in Collins' hype. I wanted to love the book. I really did. And the book thwarted that desire relentlessly.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

That is very strange. I have had characters spend time in hospitals, but I tend to deposit them there, and then pick up the story when they emerge.

I am also a little confused as to what traumatized her so much that it changed her entire personality... Prim doesn't die until toward the end, right? Soldiers can do an entire tour of combat duty without lapsing into sleepy despair, so I don't get why doing the Hunger Games again would HAVE to do that to her. I don't but that it's realism. There is a very wide range of realistic reactions.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Prim dies at the very end, not at the beginning—which I also had an issue with, because that was Katniss' worst fear realized, her greatest trauma, and we didn't even get to see the aftermath of that. It happened, and then there were two very short chapters after that, one of which was "so I married Peeta, and a few years later he convinced me to have kids, the end." It felt like, having set up protecting Prim as The Purpose Of Her Life, skipping the aftermath of Prim's death was very strange.

I think the explanation for Katniss' despair was supposed to be finding out that Thirteen was imperfect too (the leader of Thirteen, Coin, is not a very nice lady, and on top of that the book hates politicians always and Thirteen naturally does have some), but since that realization happened offstage, the impact was badly muffled. I might've bought her sleepy hopelessness better if I'd seen her realization that Thirteen was a bunch of haters, but I didn't. I heard about it after the fact.

I don't know.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

(Also, on the theme of "realistic reactions," thumbie reminds me of something that drove me bananas: at the end, when the Districts have won their revolution, they discuss whether to have a regular Hunger Games in which children from the Capitol have to participate. And Katniss votes yes, in what seemed to me like a truly spectacular undermining of character, especially as Katniss has seen that people from the Captiol are/can be real people and not faceless monsters—she actually did like Cinna and her prep team, for instance. It was like they took the last thing I liked about Katniss—her most basic sense of compassion and fairness—and stomped all over it. By the end, the Katniss I had liked was utterly gone. And maybe that was the point, but hell, I don't have to like it.)

[thumbie.livejournal.com]

Amen to this post. The only way the book makes sense to me is that it's a PTSD thing and not much survives war intact, like how they got Gale conveniently out of the romantic running and made Katniss's whole involvement moot in one fel swoop. But yes, she never dealt with grief over Prim, i mean they had her locked up and insane but that wasn't really enough. And having her vote yes on hunger games with the Capital kids was a huge character about face. It really did feel like we spent the whole book watching someones soul die and while that moves with the anti war message it's a bit unsatisfying.

Rachel you got knives right?

But

[thumbie.livejournal.com]

Wow this comment gets a b+ in spelling and grammar. Thanks ipod for being difficult!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have a collection in a cabinet. ;)

Some people seemed to think Katniss voted yes purely as ploy to assassinate someone? I guess her motivation wasn't made clear.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Some people seemed to think Katniss voted yes purely as ploy to assassinate someone? I guess her motivation wasn't made clear.

Really? I guess it's possible that was true and I missed it entirely, but yeah, I didn't get that at all. All I got was "SERIOUSLY????" (Because in the first book, she felt compassion even for Cato when the muttations were mangling him without killing him, and... and... sigh, again.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Several people in comments here: http://janni.livejournal.com/680666.html#cutid1

Again, haven't read this yet, but it's a problem if the protagonist's motivation for an utterly key decision is never clear - especially if it's something straightforward like "Was that sincere or a ploy?"

(Unless the book is something like Liar in which unknowability is a major theme. But it wasn't in the first two books, at least.)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Well, in the interest of fairness, it's always possible that I missed it through my own fault. Because by that point I was sort of wading through the grimness and may have missed things that were clear, but... yeah, I don't remember getting that connection at all.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Wow, if that's the case, it missed me completely.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I confess, I'm glad it's not just me that didn't get that!

[larryhammer]

Yeah, I've had this discussion with Janni -- it took me a while to figure out that this was probably the case but want some sort of interior indication from Katniss that this is so (possibly just after succeeding), while she thinks it's pretty clear and required no further explanation.

---L.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Hm, interesting. Because yeah, I didn't get it at all—and having not got it, it really felt like Katniss' characterization had jumped the proverbial shark at that moment. I dunno. On the one hand, sometimes it's nice to do things that are subtle in a book; on the other hand, since the scenes are from inside Katniss' POV I think a bit more explicitness would have been nice.

[janni.livejournal.com]

I spent about 30 seconds going "wtf Katniss?" and then moved on to "okay, this had better be because she's about to kill Coin," and waited for it to happen.

It did seem clear to me that she agreed to the games so that Coin wouldn't know that she'd basically pushed Katniss firmly into the Not On Her Side Camp until she could get in that shot. It's only in talking to other readers that I've realized maybe it wasn't. Am still thinking about that.

What I wanted was a thought or two from her after the deed was done--not so much for clarification (though that would only have taken a sentence and wouldn't have hurt and for many readers might have helped) as thoughts and emotions around what she'd just done.

I would have saved any thoughts and explanations for afterwards, though, to avoid making it too clear and so spoiling the scene beforehand.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I have to say that I'm actually relieved, from a purely readery POV, that there was an explanation and I missed it rather than that Katniss just lost her damn mind, which was the only other way I could explain it to myself. I agree that the 'wtf Katniss?' moment was probably deliberate, but yeah, it would have improved my reading greatly to get a stronger hint of the plan afterwards!

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I mean, I can see how trauma might have turned Katniss passive, but that doesn't make it a good story choice, especially since PTSD has all kinds of different possible effects, not just passive hopelessness.

And I'd forgotten (or blocked from my memory) the bit where Katniss voted yes on Hunger Games for the Capitol, which felt spectacularly out of character. It was almost like Collins' desire to prove a point (that War Is Hell) overrode all the characters she had made me love before.

It just... just because it fits a message about politics and war doesn't make it a satisfying narrative. And it's not that I'm angry that it upset me: it didn't upset me, it left me absolutely cold, and after the emotion I'd felt for Katniss and her friends before, "cold" is not a compliment.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the book, but I really like this review, because you are up-front about both what you disliked personally and in terms of literary structure, and how it was connected. I think tearing the heart out of Katniss meant tearing the heart out of the book, for me is the, well, heart of your argument, and that's really good.

(And less objectively: the sister DIES? Right at the end? And we don't see her reaction and the marriage sort of, well, fixes it? And she votes _for_ the Games continuing? ....Erk. I always dislike that 'don't give the audience what they want, give them what they need' fake tough-macho defense of tragic endings, because you can do tragic without making everything seem pointless.)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Prim's death... kindasorta has some impact on the last chapter? I mean, I think that's why Katniss flips and shoots President Coin. I think. But while you see her flipping out, you don't see any of the aftermath or recovery or... any of that. It felt very much like a 'see! this really is a grim book!' capstone more than it felt like something the book was going to address.

(It's not even that marriage fixes anything. She sorta winds up with Peeta for lack of anything better to do, and eventually he convinces her that having children might not be totally horrible. Soooooo... yeah? I mean, if I was a Katniss/Peeta shipper, I think I'd still be pretty annoyed, because it's sort of 'well, everything sucks for ever, so I guess I might as well shack up with him.' Very grim and grey.)

And it's not even so much that I'm mad about the tragic ending. I'd be happier if I was mad, because that'd at least be a reaction, as opposed to just feeling flat. A total reversal of expectations can work, but it has to come from somewhere; in this case, it felt like it came from a theme/moral of "war is hell" rather than from the characters, and that just didn't work for me in a big way.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

I agree with a lot of what you say. It hadn't occurred to me to have Prim die earlier so we could deal with the aftermath, but of course that would have been the more powerful book. Or even to go on to a book 4, or some hybrid situation--honestly, an entire book could have been gotten out of the post-Snow turn-over, and the assassination of Coin. Or at least half a book. I don't know.

I wonder if this is really what Collins was going for. I'm sure she wanted to portray the grimness and pointlessness of war, but...

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it felt like the most paradigm-changing possible thing for Katniss happened... at the very end of the book. I mean, perhaps Collins was trying for symmetry (with Book One starting with saving Prim, and Book Three ending with failing to do so?), but it didn't work for me because I really wanted to see how that would affect Katniss. Especially since my frustration had been that Katniss was so passive and detached through the entire book, and this was something that would force her out of detachment, and yet we still didn't see it.

I think she did want to portray the grimness and pointlessness, but (to me; again, other readers felt differently, I know) it felt like she demonstrated the numbness and pointlessness by making the book feel numbed and pointless. Which isn't the only way to convey that.