Wait until the end!

I always take rain personally.

It held off long enough for me to go and have my early morning swim and bike ride (sequentially, you understand) and then, after settling down with a book, it started to pour.  And it’s raining now with that sort of viciously increasing intensity that suggests that it will never cease.  So, it’s just as well that I still have 27% of the book to finish.

The book is The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and is a prequel to the Hunger Games series of novels by Suzanne Collins.  Or rip-off, you could say.  Though I read through the Hunger Games Trilogy with what can only be described as rabid avidity – just as I did with the Twilight series.  So, what does that say about having an English Literature degree.  Whatever you think about the literary quality of those series, you have to admit (well, I do) that they are absolute page turners.

So why have I decided to start writing about the novel when I am three-quarters of the way through and therefore should be reading frantically to get to the end?

Good question.

Having read the other novels, it is fascinating to see how a more than competent author deals with creating a gripping back-story.  We are presented with the events surrounding the tenth Hunger Games in Panem, a Panem which has not yet fully recovered from the destruction of the Rebellion, a Panem in which there are still visible scars from the war and in which there is still real deprivation.  It is worth bearing in mind that, for example in the real world, in Britain rationing after the Second World War did not fully end until 1954 – the way having ended in 1945.  So, the description of a still recovering Panem in the Hunger Games novels a decade after the ending of the Rebellion strikes home.

There is none of the flashy opulence of the stage-managed arenas of the later novels, the hunger games are still basic and confined to an amphitheatre that is an imposing, if bomb damaged pre-war relic.

We get references to elements that are going to be major in the later novels: the introduction of Mentors; the use of genetic engineering; the media exploitation of the games; the introduction of betting – a whole series of themes that the reader knows are going to be more fully developed in the later novels.  All of this I have found convincing and a please to see the manipulation of the narrative by a clever author.

The reason that I have stopped reading at the moment (there is no way that I will leave the book unread!) is that the manipulation of the author has become a little too obvious, it has be come more of the ‘I am the author and I can do what I like’ rather than the narrative having its own dynamic.

I know that Collins is not into the ‘happily ever after’ endings and most readers are going to know how things turn out: the major male character in this novel is called Snow and his grandmother grows roses on her rooftop garden and his dead mother’s compact holds rose scented powder – we have the clues, hammered home, we know where this is eventually going.  We know that this doesn’t end happily.  I just fear how mawkish it might eventually turn out to be.

And there I have offended against one of the cardinal rules of literary criticism; do not criticise something for what it has not done!  I don’t know (yet) how Collins ends this novel and I should reserve judgement.  Which I will, as each paragraph here has been written with an increasing sense of frustration as I need to go back to the text!  As you can tell my literary reserve did not last long and I will finish it off today and come back and give an opinion (as I should) on the whole thing!