Andrew's Reviews > The Hunger Games

A superbly written, well-paced, well-balanced, original young adult work that provides a unique first person insight into our female protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, the girl on fire. Fans of the book will gratified to know that I was not expecting such a high literary quality after having seen the films that bombarded us over the years, which suffer from the same propensity to stretch out the finale in two offerings, but where this works with Harry Potter so well, and can be filled in with plenty of action in The Hobbit, causes the penultimate Mockingjay to drag.

Suzanne Collins has pulled off something which the film - while true to the world-building - doesn't quite do, and that is the interiority of Katniss, whom we see in the film as the largely mardy Jennifer Lawrence, who, while captivating, acts little through facial nuance to portray what the book is always redefining, her emotional life. But there is so much to the world of the Hunger Games, the film keeps us going through action. The games themselves, and Panem as a civilisational entity, have no real causal grounding in the book - brief mention of the annihilating civil war and the need for the districts and enslavement of the working class, but largely left to the imagination without complete sociological exposition - yet the premise stands for the excesses of capitalist greed, the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, and so has a universal conceptual trueness that works as logical. Sociological verisimilitude is vital to fantasy and SF, even if it includes magic.

The magic in Collins's novel is, of course, the complicated relationship between Katniss and Peter, the theme which forms the emotional structure throughout the trilogy. While Katniss is 'sullen and hostile' (p.135), Peter has a sort of natural 'self-deprecating humour', and is the perfect foil for her. He also provides the emotional baseline about which she jerks and subsides, like a tortured marionette, and this difference, not a match made in heaven, but a healthy complementarity, works well both for the trials of the games and the emotional relationship they develop over the three years.

The testament of a good book well written is that you fly through the pages. There is one mildly dull section before the finale, but that also strengthens the bond between Katniss and Peeta which sees us through the trilogy. If love is born of kindness, this is its success. It is this humane triumph which stands against the inhumanity of Panem and its sickening privilege, and while historical overthrow of oppressive regimes (France, Russia) have not offered the world any more parity than the slow gains of liberalism and democracy, the chances of success based on kindness are evident throughout liberal daily life. Collins puts this heart into her work, and that's what makes it work as a piece of fiction, regardless of the successive waves of rebellion and final victory of the series. It does make me want to read on. And that's a nice surprise.