Mockingjay (Collins)

[cahn]

Okay, I finished Mockingjay. And... I liked it more than I thought I would. I actually did think it was good, though I certainly found the second half way way way WAY more compelling than the first (I have a couple more thoughts about this). More than that, it made me want to rant about it, which a) is a good sign, and b) usually means that it is both doing a lot of things right (otherwise I wouldn't care) and is seriously flawed (otherwise I'd just rave and declare undying love, which I'm not doing at all).

I read the last half kind of quickly, but here's my understanding of the plot: Katniss wanders around being depressed, helpless, and useless for the first half of the book, punctuated by feeling more depressed when people won't let her in on any kind of action because of how, you know, she's being all useless and everything. Meanwhile, offscreen, Peeta is tortured and is saved from being tortured by other people for no really good reason except to augment Katniss's angst in both cases. (Because, I mean, seriously? Someone as smart as Snow should've just tortured and then killed him. Snow may be evil, but he's not psychotic.) Then Katniss gets to go on a mission which has very little point, and halfway through the mission leader dies and she is given command. Instead of going back, as a reasonable person might have done, she instead decides to carry through her pretty much insane, not-particularly-well-thought-out, and not-well-motivated alternate plan of assassinating Snow. This mission does not succeed and has no point, killing at least one completely innocent person and most of her team (including Finnick, who was awesome) in the process. Then she has the gall to be upset at Gale for, you know, doing the exact same thing, only with the difference that his mission actually worked to stop a war and avert more loss of life, whereas hers was a complete failure. In general, she is a bystander while other people manufacture the important, interesting events (the massacre, winning the war, capturing Snow, that sort of thing). As part of this, her sister dies. Then she angsts yet again about how she has been Used and Manipulated by Others. Then she kills Coin (okay, that part was awesome). Then she moves back to 12. Surprise, Peeta moves with her! So they get married and have Babies.

Okay, so, when you boil it down, almost nothing important happens on-stage in this book. Everything happens off-stage and not to Katniss, with one exception (Coin). Even worse, Katniss herself almost never decides to do anything. Everything is decided for her. She's told when she gets to go on a mission and when she doesn't. She's given make-work to keep her occupied while other people do the important things. I kind of believe that she would've ended up with Gale if Gale had moved to 12 instead of Peeta. The only thing she does herself is kill Coin, which I must admit is pretty great and which floored me at the time.

Also, there are limits to how much she can be surprised, horrified, and shocked by finding out that people are Using Her! before I start rolling my eyes a little about it. Oh Katniss, never go into politics. Or be part of any sort of organization larger than a hundred people and not containing a large percentage of engineers. Don't ever be part of the grownup world. Which... is kind of what she does at the end. Which is okay, but again, not very interesting to me.

Okay, so, I get that Katniss's experiences have broken her. That's even somewhat realistic, which is nice. But you know... I have a limit to how much I can stand someone angsting about it, and I am also just not interested in plotlines which go nowhere. (The only point of Katniss's mission, as far as I can tell, was to get her to the point where she saw Prim die, which I feel could have been done much faster and with much less fuss.) And you know what? I have a simple solution. In fact, I have two simple solutions!

First: you know, it's a book, not a real-time simulation. We don't really have to see every boring little thought Katniss thinks. (Bujold does this to great effect in Barrayar, where Cordelia goes through much of the book unhappy, depressed, and borderline manic. Kind of like Katniss! But we don't dwell on it. Also, let me say that Cordelia's mission, while similarly perhaps too hasty, was at least rather better thought out than Katniss's.)

For my second solution, I shall compare the Hunger Games books to sarahtales's Demon books, which I'm thinking about because they were the ones where I first noticed this trick. (Though once I figured it out, I saw it everywhere: Megan Whalen Turner. Or Bujold. I'll mention them both in a minute.) In particular, the thing that surprised me about Brennan's books: the first book in her trilogy, Demon's Lexicon, had a great POV character who was essential for the story being told. He was also a sexy dude who felt some degree of angst over various things. So Brennan could have said, "Hey, my sexy dude is a big hit! I'll write another book from his POV detailing what happens next and show more of his angst!" Indeed, this is what I was expecting. Brennan did not do this. The POV character of the second book in the trilogy is completely different. We still see the angst of the first character; the angst is more powerful because we're seeing it from a different POV and aren't clonked on the head with it all the time. More importantly and generally, the story is able to open up because of this.

Basically I would have preferred anyone at all besides Katniss as the narrator (it could have had interleaved chapters with Katniss, even! Bujold did this with Mark in Mirror Dance -- I looked it up, and while I remembered his torture scenes as taking forever, they only actually take two chapters, one of which is two pages), and this would have done a lot to eliminate the twin problems of a) no actual plot happening on-screen in the book, and b) the parts which might ordinarily have been taken up with plot being filled instead with annoying and boring angst. I have a favorite candidate narrator, of course: Haymitch. (Though almost any other character would have done as well. Peeta. Gale. Finnick. Prim. Every single one of those, I felt, had a more interesting story than Katniss.) Haymitch is by far the most interesting character -- he's a drunk. A bona fide, soused, passed-out-half-the-time drunk. And yet he brings it together to help mastermind a rebellion. He holds it together enough to see the rebellion to its end. He kicks and prods Katniss into action when she's being angsty (with less reason than he has, I might add). When the war is done, he moves back to 12 and passes out again. He retreats from the world even more than Katniss. He's a loser in the game of life. He has no one and nobody, except maybe Katniss, sort-of-kind-of, and she doesn't even like him. He's broken. And yet he is fascinating to me where Katniss is not, because he also wins; he sees his plan through to the end, even though in a real way it doesn't benefit him at all. Think about all that Haymitch is doing while Katniss is busy whining. Wouldn't that have made a way more interesting book? Plus which I would love to know what he had to say about the love triangle; I would find that more interesting than what Katniss thought about it.

(The love triangle: I have nothing to say about this except that Gale suddenly grew a character, more than Peeta had, and I favored him just for that, but then I decided he was wrong for Katniss when he said that she'd choose whoever she couldn't survive without. Uh, no. She'd choose the person who took longest to give up on her, being that her whole modus operandi at this point was to passively accept whatever happened to her. Barring that, she'd choose the person who couldn't live without her, not the other way around. If Gale couldn't see that, he clearly didn't understand her well enough. Also, I was glad Gale didn't die, that would have been too cliche.)

Of course, with Haymitch as the POV character, it wouldn't be a YA novel. You'd have to start wrestling seriously with things like -- well, Haymitch clearly knows what Coin is up to, he's not *ahem* stupid and naive. What Coin is doing becomes less of a twist and more of a serious ethical/thematic question of shades of grey. And that's the thing. I see this as Collins falling short of taking that next step. One of the prerequisites, I feel, to being a great author is that you don't shy away from taking that experimental step, even though it may screw things up for what you thought was a nice neat thought-out book, even though your fans may hate it (of course some of them will; they liked what you did previously!), even though it may actually be a failure. (I personally, for example, think Bujold's Sharing Knife experiment was mostly a failure. But she did the experiment, which I totally respect.) Megan Whalen Turner could have -- I think she says this in an interview somewhere -- gone on writing children's fic about Gen pulling off daring thieving exploits forever, and I may well have read them all. She didn't. Instead she wrote about how Gen's whole world turned upside down. He couldn't do any of what he once did; he became something that was far more than he had been or even what he wanted to be. He had Consequences like crazy. It wasn't kiddie lit anymore. I'd even say I wouldn't quite classify King of Attolia as YA (how much YA do you know that features a happy marriage?). The world opened up. (She's doing it again with Conspiracy of Kings; it's very clear that the world is getting larger and a huger conflict is in the works. And, you know, a lot of people hated that it wasn't all about Gen anymore.) Sticking to a tried-and-true formula -- not doing so won't make you great, but you definitely won't be great if you cling to the formula that already worked.


ETA: GAH, I am sorry for the un-cut spoilers. Defective tag has been fixed.