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| Mockingjay |
Mockingjay completes Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy and it is a spectacular ending indeed. I really enjoyed this series. It’s got everything that I love in stories: great, believable characters; terrific plot and pacing; ethical conflict; harrowing action sequences; examinations of human nature.
In Mockingjay, Katniss finds herself free of the Capital–but not free of government control. Most of her world believed that District 13 was destroyed some 75 years previously. But they just went underground, literally. The inhabitants rescued her at the explosive end of the last book, hoping to use her as a symbol for the rest of the rebels to rally around. At first, Katniss resists, not wanting to be the cause of more deaths. She manages to cut a deal with the rebel government to save the lives of other victors of the Hunger Games, including that of her erstwhile boyfriend, Peeta. In exchange for their lives, Katniss becomes the Mockingjay. She reluctantly agrees to be filmed to make propaganda. In the background, a real war is being fought. There is a strange disconnect between Katniss’s sort of dangerous war and that real war.
Descriptions of life in District 13 add to the feelings of menace this book evokes. Life under President Coin is highly regimented–to the extent that everyone receives a daily schedule they must follow. Food is rationed, providing just enough calories to keep people going. Jobs are assigned. Everyone is micromanaged. Katniss is the only person, outside of the president, who gets some freedom. I wondered–as I expect Collins wanted to me to–that life wouldn’t be much better under this regime than the last. If the rebels won and put Coin in control, it’s clear that the roles of the Capital and the Districts would be reversed and they’d all be fighting it out in another 75 years or so. The anger that some of the rebels express and their willingness to be as cruel as their enemies call to mind the aftermath of the French and Russian revolutions. I theorize that those reigns of terror were a very bloody kind of catharsis for years of abuse.
The war gets real for Katniss by the end. She gets to rise above her role as a figurehead. She is also witness to some heartbreaking acts of war that make it clear that, unless someone changes the path the country is on, the killing will not stop. The ending is amazing. I think my jaw dropped as I read it. I loved the epilogue that followed. I can’t say why for fear of ruining the entire trilogy, so I think I will stop summarizing here.
I think what I love most about these books is that Collins does not pull her punches. She makes these books very violent and dangerous, and you get a strong sense of the stakes people are playing for here. And being the cynic that I am (especially after I read the news), I can believe that governments can be this cruel and that revenge has a very, very long half-life.