Mockingjay

Okay, I'm talking about the ending of the last book in this post, so anyone who doesn't want spoilers LOOK AWAY NOW.


So, I've just spent the last week hot-housed in Katniss Everdeen's head, more or less, and it's feeling a little hard to shake.  I read the first half of Hunger Games over the course of a week or so, whenever I had time to get in a bit of free reading and enough head-space to deal with something more complicated than a magazine.  Then, for the week I had free over Christmas, I finished the rest of the book in a couple of evenings, and grabbed the second book.

I blitzed through the second book and immediately reached for the third, which I practically read in one day (I actually started it the night before), whilst holed up in a house taking care of a dog who hates storms.  With the storms coming and going outside and the dog trying to figure out how to climb onto my lap, I followed Katniss down the rather desperate and depressing path she was on - and came out the other side of the book feeling incredibly bummed out.

The third book of the trilogy is terrible.  And, by association, the second book in the trilogy is also terrible.

The first book was one of those "wow" books - the ones that make you sit up and take notice.  No matter what you may think of the characters or the settings, it lodges itself firmly in your brain and makes you want to follow the characters wherever they may take you.  The first book in the Wheel of Time series was like that.  Same, unfortunately, with Twilight.

And, like both of those series, the second book is something that pushes you forward to whatever will follow, even if (in hindsight) nothing much happens in the grand scheme of things.

What these series all have in common was the fact that I followed the characters further than I really wanted to in the subsequent books.  At some point, I realised I was hating it.  I no longer liked these people.  I no longer cared about them the way I did when I started - I just wanted to see what happened to them in the end.  The Twilight books made me want to punch all of the characters in the head (and then track down the author and smack her around a little).  The Wheel of Time series just dragged on for so long that I realised it had lost everything that had drawn me to it in the first place.

As for The Hunger Games series?  Well, the first book was something magical.  The second book built you towards something that could be very, very good.  The third book lost the plot towards the end and left you feeling sad, depressed and surrounded by loose ends - loose ends which were kind of tied up, but just not satisfactorily.  No closure.

Whatever drew me to the characters and the story in the first book was either dropped, killed or maimed by the end of the third.  I could see how it could all come to this - there was an extent to which the story really couldn't end well.  It was like the author had grabbed the tail of a snake, and there was no way she could put it down without either killing the snake or being bitten.  The ending was always going to be tinged with sadness...  But I couldn't figure out why it felt so "blah".  Then I realised:  I still wanted to know what happened to the "star-crossed lovers from District 12", and they hadn't been properly acquitted.

It felt like Suzanne Collins gave up on that story, by the end.  Actually, it kind of felt like she gave up, full-stop.  After following Katniss in almost real time for the first two-and-a-half books, the end of the third flagged into a different kind of story-telling, glossed over things that would have (and should have) been given more attention if they had happened earlier in the piece.  So many things suddenly mentioned, given little attention, and then dismissed.  So many times when someone should have thought of or remembered a key detail (to help connect the past with the present) and didn't.

Back when I used to try to write books, I always struggled with getting past the fifth chapter (or, for short stories, the first third).  My attention span could only keep me going for so long, and then I felt like I really couldn't continue to put the same level of effort into finishing it off.  Most of the time I just didn't finish the next chapter at all, but I would occasionally find myself "getting it over with" - like I was just trying to get to the finish line, but was seriously flagging.

I'd throw in a few half-hearted ideas and then try to pad them out to make it look like I actually had a plan, rather than just an idea of what I wanted the last line to be and a flaky concept of how to get there that I really couldn't flesh out properly.  This is probably why I hardly ever finish things - I hate the downhill slope I inevitably find myself on.  Well, that, and I'm rather crap, really.

It felt like this happened in the last few chapters of Mockingjay.  Like Collins starting concentrating on a way to get it to the finish line and ended up going for impact, rather than resolution.

Sure, war is hell and people you love will die.  It did feel a little bit like we were killing characters off just for the sake of the "oh, no, not her!" moment.  The fact that no one (and I mean no one) commented on the fact that the entire series of events was triggered by saving this character, so killing her off at the end pretty much made everything in the middle pointless, seemed odd.  I would have thought a moment of reflection - even of the "why am I alive and not her?" kind - would have been in order.

And the thing with the presidents?  "I'm going to kill him, I'm going to kill him, I'm going to kill him.  I'm going to ignore the deaths of people close to me so I can kill him.  I'm going to push on against all the odds so I can kill him... I'm going to have one conversation with him that I don't really think about quite as much as I would have, if I had had this conversation in the last book, and then I'm going to kill someone else.  Oh, he died too.  Well, there you go."

And after so much angst over figuring out what she does and doesn't feel about Peeta, she never even spares a thought for how he'd feel if she succeeding in killing herself?  And then never feels bad about not giving him a thought?

Which brings us to the star-crossed lovers thing.  In the first book, there was basically an A plot and a B plot.  The A plot was a coming-of-age-under-challenging-circumstances thing.  Girl who tries to shield her heart from harm meets Boy who would do anything to touch her heart; they struggle together against a challenge, and will he win her in the end - will she connect with her feelings in order to feel something for him?  The B plot was post-apocalyptic-world-where-maybe-it's-time-for-a-rebel-uprising.  Will the Girl defy the powers-that-be and live?

In the first book, the B plot was an undercurrent that made the A plot a little more interesting.  In the second book, both plots took equal space.  In the third book, the B plot took over almost entirely, then beat the A plot to a bloody pulp.  Who has time for love stories when we have war and cruelty and reluctant heroes falling apart?

So, by the end of the book, the love story is almost completely trashed and abandoned and has become a story about damaged people trying to work out if what they once felt for each other (whatever that might have been, since Katniss never did work it out) is going to stop them from killing each other.  Oh, but wait!  Here, at the very end, are two paragraphs saying that they eventually got a bit better and lived the rest of their lives mostly-okay-ever-after.

In the end, Collins gave more attention to the food served in the Capitol and District 13 than she did to the resolution of the "star-crossed lovers" plot.

Given how much we invested in them in the first book, I feel we deserved more.  We needed that moment where she realises she really does love him to be more than a pithy handful of lines thrown in at the end to tidy things up.  It warrants a whole scene, dammit!

So, you could say I'm not happy with the third book in the trilogy.  Since the second book was building up to the third, and isn't worth reading on its own, I'm not happy with that one, either.  The first book was brilliant, though.  I'd recommend it to anyone.