Saturday, June 23, 2012

The Spoils of War

I approach Young Adult Fiction with relish. I appreciate the fact that most YAF is not salted with an abundance of profanities. I enjoy the early growth of characters' humanity: coming of age, struggling out of the cocoon, defining good over against evil. The best stories, of course, twist the course of growth with ambiguity: discovering the impurity of human goodness, darkness in one's own soul, virtue in the blackest of characters. In the end, however, redemption is the order of the day. Small or large, clear or foggy, I wait for The Greatest Story Ever Told to shine through somehow.

Even after seeing the film adaptation (out of order, I admit), it was not until I read the front jacket of The Hunger Games that I realized Suzanne Collins' trilogy would not stay the course of YAF. The three books--The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay (2010)--are a progressive meditation on war. The meditation happens to be through the eyes of an adolescent.

The premise of The Hunger Games is the unthinkable atrocity of a culture which forces selected youths to kill each other in a game show. When Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark beat the system with their feigned narrative of star-crossed lovers, the plot of the trilogy thickens. An alternate society appears, waiting in the wings, ready to topple the horrific culture of the Capitol with a brave new beginning.

In a way, we readers can see it coming. The twists resemble a wooden roller coaster, whose complete course we have seen from a distance but whose particular jolts and drops we still queue up to experience. There is even a note of fatalism in the final twist of the trilogy, which took me by surprise while I knew it had to happen.

The master stroke of Collins' words is not the course of the plot. Her narrative mastery comes through in her development of Katniss Everdeen--or, to be more accurate, Everdeen's non-development. Since the entire trilogy comes to us through the first-person lens of Everdeen's experience, my hope was less for the redemption of the Thirteen Districts and more for the redemption of Katniss. Would she emerge from the cocoon of war, the grave-wrappings of despair, and find--joy? love? peace? self-determination?

The Katniss Everdeen I found at the end of Mockingjay resembled--like a washed-out wraith who can only find a faded high-schooler in the mirror--an even harder version of the youth on page one of The Hunger Games. Love has been lost, peace has proven elusive, and joy has flown the coop. And as for self-determination: Katniss Everdeen only made one honest-to-goodness choice in her narrated life, and it was a choice forced upon her by circumstances beyond her control.

The depth of Everdeen's circumstances is plumbed only by the conscious recognition, voiced in a one-line paragraph near the end of Mockingjay, that she is completely alone. Her family, whether they intended it or not, has left her alone. Her friends, if she ever really had any, have left her alone. The world, we cannot help but believe intentionally, has left her alone. The Games, the war, and all of her betrayals become particular expressions of this broader, despairing reality from which there is no escape. With the honorable Romeo and Juliet option deprived of her at the end of book one, Everdeen is left to drift into the numb fog of solitude.

If I had paid for these books, I might have fretted that I could not get my money back. As Young Adult Fiction the series left me cold. Collins' dust jacket forces me to reassess, however. As a meditation on war--for a reader whose nation sends droves of adolescents off to fight battles broadcast on the airwaves for rewards more crippling than glorious--perhaps the value of The Hunger Games is not its echo of The Greatest Story. Perhaps its value is in revealing the need for The Greatest Story.

Katniss Everdeen becomes the youth who can survive through anything. But that survival results in a calcification of the soul, a numbness which even the best-trained cynic cannot relish. Her story begs the question: are young warriors--whatever their battles--doomed to this end? Or is there redemption for them?

~ emrys

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