Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Katniss: The Girl Who Stumbled Into Relevance

Catching Fire
by Suzanne Collins
p.2009





Warning: This review is ridden with spoilers so if you haven’t already read the books and have any intention at all of seeing how this trilogy progresses, I would suggest avoiding this review, because the best thing this trilogy has going for it is the element of surprise. I haven’t even bothered to spoiler blackbar it because they are littered throughout.



My review of book one in the trilogy can be read here (though it is really more of a comparison between book and movie).



The story picks up not very long after the end of the first book, with Peeta and Katniss coming home anomalous double victors of the 74th Hunger Games thanks to their trick on the Capitol. The ruse isn’t over with the games, of course. The 17-year-olds have to keep up their faux relationship to maintain the already flimsy excuse, for if they revealed the true nature of their relationship, they would lose public favor, and it’s the only thing keeping them and their families alive.


It quickly becomes obvious that the Capitol (led by President Snow, who is often and unsubtly described as snakelike) isn’t buying any of this shit and that they fully intend on ruining Katniss’s life, which starts by disrupting her routines and cracking down on illegal activities in District 12, escalates to physical attacks on anyone who helps her, and culminates in shoehorning Katniss and Peeta back into the Games a second year in a row. That’s right, the not-quite-lovebirds are heading back the arena. I’ve stated already that Suzanne Collins’ ability to catch the reader off guard is the best thing this trilogy has to offer but I’ll admit this is one thing I was fully expecting. Still, it was devastating to see the inevitable set in motion, to see our characters never catch a break.


The reason for this unprecedented move is spurred by ‘special occasion’; it is the 75th anniversary of the Games and as such a ‘Quarter Quell’ has determined that only previous victors may compete. I’m sure this had 99% of Panem breathing a big fucking sigh of relief—until they realized they would have to watch their former idols and icons kill each other off. I personally was happy to see this rule, not only because it got our main duo back in action, but because it meant this year almost everyone competing was an adult. The one thing that has always bothered me about the premise of Collins’ trilogy is how much I have to suspend my disbelief that any self-respecting adult would stand by and allow children to compete. If the Hunger Games trilogy were written for adults and featured adults I would not have a hard time buying the premise at all, but it is written for a younger set so I understand why the age range was set in place. Seeing adults go in for the fight was sad—most especially the mother of three and Mags, the elderly volunteer tribute—but somehow still less sad than say a twelve-year-old who never had a chance at a proper life. ‘Children in peril’ is a natural if unoriginal plot device that works every time because the need to protect an innocent child evokes something in almost everyone.


Of course, no one deserves to die this way at all, and thank goodness some sense finally came out as the rebel plotline was slowly introduced and the Games thwarted for the second time in history.


It’s obvious that everything that transpires—from Katniss and Peeta’s reentry to the crackdowns in the Districts and other setbacks—is a direct result of the Capitol’s meddling. They know everything there is to know and Katniss is left with very little power. As I understand it, this is one of the chief complaints about Katniss as a hero—her lack of awareness that causes her to be constantly manipulated. This is a valid complaint, but I can see a few stylistic reasons for this.


For one, as the books are written solely in limited first person perspective, we can only know what Katniss knows, and to know for certain about external events would detract from the twists that Collins wanted to keep the readers engaged.


Secondly, Katniss is a role model of sorts for young readers, and this is both good and bad. Bad, obviously, because she is not an active controller of her fate and lets things happen to her, but good too because she presents as a confused, hapless youth doing the best she can. Again and again she protests her status symbol, maintaining that she doesn’t want to be a heroine, that she doesn’t know how and can’t see what she’s doing to make herself seem so special, and this is a feeling that many teens and young adults can relate to—that feeling that you’ve been immersed in something beyond your control and don’t belong. How many of us can say we'd react any better if placed in her situation? For better or worse, Katniss is an inherently relatable character.


I can’t say for certain whether this will turn out for the best, not until I’ve read the final installment in this trilogy, but this is a train of thought worth putting out there in the meantime, something to consider going forward. Perhaps I will be back here in a few days raging; we'll see...


My feelings about Katniss haven’t changed much from book one—I don’t loathe her, but I don’t love her either. In spite of her initial selflessness that got her into this mess—saving her sister—Katniss presents as a very self-centered person, though less so than in book one, when she was still afraid to let others in. Catching Fire Katniss has a wider array of people in the net of her concerns: Gale, Peeta, Haymitch, Madge, Cinna, to name a few. And she’s growing softer, however reluctantly.


Peeta I still have a special fondness for, the poor friend-zoned thing. It was less awkward than in the first book (though I have every expectation that the movie will ruin this as it did last year), but still painful to sit through. I tend to have a soft spot for the ‘nice guy’ archetype, and I like that—even if he doesn’t know it—he’s finding a place as a leader who is good with words and people, even if the list of people who care about him is a lot shorter. He is stalwart and possesses a surprising strength—I actually guffawed at his ‘love child’ bomb dropping in the interview and I don’t look forward to what befalls him in book three, but if he comes out of it, he’ll be even stronger. I just hope he finds someone to care about him the way everyone loves Katniss, because on the whole he’s a lot more likeable.


Finnick Odair is the newcomer and written to be every bit as likeable as he is made out to be in the Capitol, where he carries Golden Boy status among the victors. I was thrilled to see the Games thwarted because he was a shoe-in for tragic death scene if things progressed the way they did in book one. I know he grew up in what is essentially America, but I’ll be damned if I had a hard time reading Finnick’s lines in anything but a Scottish brogue. I mean, his name is Finnick Odair for chrissake. If he doesn’t present with some sort of European accent in the film they’ve made a huge mistake.


Mags was definitely written to be a fan favorite and, if her age is any indication, a top contender for the sacrificial death pool. True to feisty form though, Mags’ death—while tragic—still evoked a smile from me when she kissed the Adonis-like Finnick full on the lips. Because, let’s face it, if I were going to my certain death, I’d probably lay some sugar on the hottest tribute that ever lived too. Might as well.


Other characters were a disappointment. Gale does a bit more, but most of it’s brooding and stonewalling Katniss. Katniss and Prim’s relationship is barely touched, which is a shame since it is that closeness that spurred events in the first place. Katniss never bothers to mend her relationship with her mother, who doesn’t even have a name. Cinna is just there to chew the scenery and dispense hugs. Haymitch is back to drinking and rubbing off on a traumatized Katniss. But all of this seems to be setting the stage for what’s to come. I don’t expect to see all of this resolved, but I’m most interested in Haymitch and the rebels, led (somewhat surprisingly) by the new Gamemaker, Plutarch Heavensbee (about to be played by the brilliant Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the new movie, so here’s to hoping the movie isn’t all bad!)


Oh, and I totally called District 13 right from the first time it was mentioned, and I hope everyone else did too. Collins is in top form when she’s setting the scene for later events. Everything alluded to early in the book comes back to be of consequence later on. Foreshadow and illusion are definitely the tricks of her trade here, and it all lends itself to a story you don’t want to put down for any distraction.


... And speaking of, I’ve got to go pick up Mockingjay now, as it’s been mocking me for the last three days.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere, Frith Help Us!

Watership Down
by Richard Adams
 p. 1972 







I didn’t start this blog intending for it to be a feminist literature blog; I truly had no intentions of discussing gender roles every single time I read a book and I don’t, on the whole, it just happens that I’ve read a lot of books written between the fifties and seventies lately, and by chance Watership Down is just the latest in a string of books where discussing gender roles cannot be ignored, especially since it figures directly into the plot here.


I had no idea what to expect plot-wise, as I'd never read Watership Down as a kid, though it would have been right up my alley, given my love of animal adventures (my first ever ‘book’, written by my first-grade self, was a story about ten animal friends; is now notoriously lost to the ages). Watership Down is not a kid-friendly adventure in the vein of Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, though it would not be inappropriate for all kids, just those with more... delicate sensibilities. It is never graphic, but there are descriptions of rabbits being killed that could scare younger readers.


The plot is simple; Hazel, the protagonist, is a young, sturdy rabbit whose brother Fiver, the runt of the litter and a prophet of sorts, predicts a dire future for the warren in which they’ve lived their whole lives. Fiver is a peculiar creature among rabbits but Hazel trusts him and manages to convince a few other youngsters to follow them on their journey into the unknown. Since rabbits are prey to pretty much everything, they encounter many dangers on the way but eventually settle a new warren on Watership Down and are content to live out their days... until they discover they totally forgot to bring girls along.


The second half of the book is concerned primarily with finding some girls to populate their new digs and have their many rabbit babies. Call me crazy but I caught on to this oversight right away when they kept introducing more and more androgynously-named rabbits (like Hazel, Holly and Strawberry, to name a few) and none of them turned out to be female, but none of our heroes joined me in this revelation. This is explained by the excuse that rabbits do not have the capacity to think beyond the immediate danger (and this excuse is widely supported by their simplicity), but I still found it a little silly that none of them thought to convince a few girls to come along, especially since everyone that remained was brutally slaughtered and judging by the complacency of the does they eventually do bring home, it doesn’t seem crazy to think that it would have been easy to convince a few to join them.


There are a couple female rabbits of note later on but none of them ever come close to providing the same qualities that the male rabbits do. Their sole purpose in this novel and the only reason for including them is to procreate.  Apparently film and TV adaptations of Watership Down adjusted for political correctness and gender flipped a few rabbits, or made up a few, but as there were only a couple years in between these and the book’s publication, I have to wonder what the deal is. It makes me even sadder since Adams apparently wrote this story for his daughters, yet failed to include any girls. And it’s not even like all the rabbits are timid, dull creatures. Each of the male rabbits has their area of usefulness and moments of heroism, but the girls are left out. One of them even gets snatched by a fox and they shrug it off and say "what's one more or less doe?" In a story that highlights the importance of cultural evolution and innovation, why couldn't gender roles be challenged as well? I'm sure the girls would have fought just as bravely for the lives.


The women-exist-solely-as-breeders theme aside, there is still a lot to enjoy about Watership Down. Stylistically, I was reminded of The Hobbit in that we follow a group of unlikely heroes on an important journey. On the way they battle and overcome differences and tell stories. In the rabbits’ case, all of their stories center on a rabbit folk hero named El-ahrairah (“Prince with a Thousand Enemies”, as the footnotes translate), and his interactions with the woodland creatures as well as the rabbit (or “Lapine”) equivalents of God and Death, Frith (the sun) and the Black Rabbit of Inlé, respectively. Occasionally these stories would intersect with or inspire the events of the story, since El-ahrairah embodies the trickster spirit of rabbits and our heroes often had to think beyond their simple lives to survive. Mostly though, I found these deviations from the story tiresome and distracting.


My favorite character shifted as the story progressed and each rabbit had their moment to shine. Right off the bat I favored the protagonist Hazel, admiring him for his bravery and his faith in his brother which thrust him into a leadership position, but admonished him later for letting his ambitions lead him astray. Fiver, the prophetic brother, was a bit too spastic for me to enjoy at first, but he grew up a lot on the journey and had more moments of clarity than anyone; he never minded being universally despised either, he just did what he thought he had to to save his people. Holly, an early antagonist who almost prevents the group from leaving the warren, shows up later, one of only two survivors; shaken by traumatic events, he is humbled and helpful and helps the new group. Bluebell—the other survivor—holds a special place in my heart for being the eternal joker who gets his friends through hard times. Dandelion is the quickest runner and the ablest storyteller and Blackberry is the cleverest rabbit of them all, able to imagine his way out of every scrape using skills incomprehensible to his friends. Even the villain, General Woundwort, is a remarkably sympathetic antagonist, one you can’t help but admire a little for his stalwartness. The only rabbit I strongly adored consistently was Bigwig, the fighter, a constant source of strength and loyalty, who challenges Hazel when he needs challenging but nobly steps aside when he realizes he is not the true leader. Bigwig suffers perhaps more than any other rabbit but he remains Watership Down’s staunchest ally.


My only other complaint is that [spoiler alert! Highlight text to read] no rabbits actually die on the entire journey OR in the climatic end battle, with the exception of a few does (but who cares about them, AM I RIGHT?!) and a few of Woundwort’s men. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not gunning for their blood or advocating a rabbit snuff tale or anything, but I think it took a lot away from the impact of the journey that there were no losses. To stand up for what you believe in takes courage and can be rewarding but even kids should learn that taking a stand sometimes has consequences. At the end of the story, when everyone lived happily ever after, I didn’t really feel like as much was at stake as I would have if we’d seen a few of the characters lost along the way.


This book was definitely not what I was expecting, and I wonder how differently I would be looking at it if I had read it as a child. As it stands, I was a little disappointed I didn’t like it more as an adult. I was a little interested in checking out the film and TV versions... until I found out that BOTH versions carelessly omitted Bluebell, which I found to be a severe error in judgment on their parts. I will now be boycotting any version until they make one that includes my favorite trickster rabbit. TAKE NOTE HOLLYWOOD. (And while you’re at it, give a few of the good parts to the ladies, will ya?)

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Casual Racism and Cattle Rustling in Northern Australia

The Irishman
by Elizabeth O'Conner
p. 1960





Despite being set in northern Australia, Elizabeth O’Conner’s The Irishman is an inherently Irish novel, as it is tragic and naturalistic and chiefly concerned with the sins of the father. For awhile near the beginning, I kept forgetting it wasn’t set in Ireland; what kept bringing me back to reality is the overwhelming presence of racist undertones in response to the assortment of aboriginal characters.

At its heart, The Irishman is a classic bildungsroman, or coming of age story. Young Michael Doolan—twelve years old at novel’s start—is a shadow of his father, Paddy Doolan, the notorious, stoic and often drunk teamster in an early 20th century remote Australian town. To Michael, Paddy can do no wrong and he stands tall in the boy’s eyes, in spite of his cowering mother and rebellious older brother Will, who hates his father’s uncivilized, selfish ways. Michael sees none of this though, enamored as he is with the hero his father represents. To the reader, the cracks are already beginning to show but to Michael, it understandably takes a bit more time and perspective, and it all starts when Paddy abandons his family about halfway through the book. Michael, determined to truly know his father, sets out to find him, but it takes him a long time and a lot of trouble to get there and when he finally does, he’s not the same boy that set out.

Michael is growing up in a rough, constantly changing world. He often straddles the line between the old ways of his father and the new method which his brother—exiled from his home until his father exiles himself—later adopts. The contrast between the old and the young is felt and there is no clear emphasis on which way is the best way, but it is clear that with the advent of the automobile and other technologies, the old ways, for better or worse, are dying. In both his chosen profession and his place in his boy’s heart, Paddy Doolan is slowly becoming obsolete. It is a tough theme to wrestle with and O’Conner handles it with grace and beauty. This would have been a novel worth reading again and exploring its complex themes... if not for the casual racism.

It starts somewhat innocuously. Will, having left home for a job wrangling cattle at a nearby station called Timbooran, finds himself in thrall with a black aboriginal servant girl who works for the station manager’s wife. The girl—for lack of a proper name, simply called Bo-Bo, a pile of gibberish she uttered when they found her as a baby—is educated and appears to be a favorite of the missus, and it is her unusual forwardness that both repulses and attracts Will to her. But he cannot start a proper relationship because people will talk so when he knocks the girl up then shuts her down refusing to acknowledge it, poor Bo-Bo throws herself off a cliff to her death. Will not only moves on, but his life gets infinitely better. I kept waiting for the novel to revisit the Bo-Bo story and Will’s own tale of growing up and accepting his sins but it never does and—unless you count getting his face punched in by Paddy, which anyone could see coming a mile away—Will never even receives his comeuppance.

The only reason I could summon for this awkward and unpleasant side story is to draw a parallel between Will and Mr. Dalgliesh, the station manager Michael comes to work for who alters the course of Michael’s life. Dalgliesh, a stern, taciturn, humorless man, is at first a bad match for wild, charismatic Michael, who is constantly planning to escape this work detail. Dalgliesh gives Michael grunt work, is moody and laconic, and at one point retaliates against a cattle-stealing neighbor by murdering 200 of his cattle in what can only be considered the act of a sociopath, and yet his ‘darkest’ secret is the implicated affair with his aboriginal servant Paula. I spent far too long trying to find the part where Paula was revealed to be a sympathetic character and Michael learned to get over his racism. Sure, she harbored a crush on a married man, but the only sin anyone was concerned with was that Paula dared to be familiar with white people. From the moment she appears, O’Conner’s language makes it very clear that there is something sinister about Paula and Dalgliesh. We are never given an opportunity to view her situation in a sympathetic light... not until Paula is brutally murdered by a frustrated and off her rocker Mrs. Dalgliesh near the end. Michael hears of these events later and shrugs it off, thinking Paula probably didn’t deserve it but it’s no matter because the black characters are treated as disposable and their loss is never felt. Michael even goes back to work for Dalgliesh in the end, having seen that his way was 'best.'
All of this I might have overlooked, but then O’Conner had to throw in one last far-too-forward black servant who overstepped his boundaries. This one had the audacity to try to tell others how to do their job and for that he got his face punched in by a pissed off kid with missing daddy issues and no one felt bad for him at all. Look, I know this book was written in the fifties, so I ought not to be surprised, but the dogged racism really distracted me from the whole experience and pulled me out of the events. They weren’t even necessary to tell the story of boy and man and that rocky path called adolescence. It’s as if O’Conner just really had some racist things to say and invented a venue from which to spout them.

All of this criticism and I haven’t even gotten to the part where the white women (the only ones we’re supposed to like, apparently), are all timid, fearful messes accepting of verbally and physically abusive relationships. For a book written by a woman, it sure does a disservice to female writers, and yet it still won the Miles Franklin Award in 1960.

I suppose it’s fitting that I’m reading a novel with outdated, politically incorrect language and attitude, when the underlying theme is about accepting one’s obsoleteness in a changing world.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Another Fun Romp In Cold War Paranoia!



Year of Consent
by Kendell Foster Crossen
p. 1954



Don’t be confused by the cover, which features a massive machine literally enveloping a puny human in its sinister grip. Kendell Foster Crossen’s 1954 novel about a supercomputer that runs our lives isn’t so much a straight up science fiction novel as it is a dystopic future novel. There is no computer sucking our brains out through tubes—at least not literally. False advertising, people—this is your first cold hard lesson in media manipulation, and a rather appropriate one considering the themes the novel goes on to introduce.


As I’ve stated before, I like reading books like this for a variety of reasons—seeing how accurately (or not) past writers predicted the future, and seeing what ideas developed from the intense Cold War paranoia of the time are foremost on my list. There are a lot of reasons I find these short novels tedious as well; women rarely, if at all, represent positive and influential figures—a product of the conservative era in which they were written, undoubtedly. Also, they are not very well written most of the time, and Year of Consent is sadly not an exception to this rule, but I think it’s a very important book and worth bringing to the forefront for the historical context it provides.


Year of Consent is set in 1990—36 years on from the year it was written, but for us it’s 23 years in the past. It’s always amusing to see what past ‘science fiction’ writers predicted for the future and what they failed to comprehend. Crossen’s novel sees us with self-cooking ovens that supply the food from warehouses, but it failed to predict the rise of personal computers. As a contemporary science fiction author, it’s intimidating when I look at my own work and find my predictions for science and politics woefully inadequate. The truth is we will never really know what the future holds technologically-speaking, but ideas—more often than not—hold true. This isn’t because all these authors are prescient so much as it is because ideas, and societal norms, are cyclical and people, on the whole, are pretty predictable.


Crossen’s 1990 imagines a world of four social classes—the producers (pros), the consumers (cons), the non-producers (nulls), who as I understand it, are pretty much the artists and writers who produce whatever semblance of ‘culture’ exists, and a secret class of social engineers, the people who truly have all the answers. Our narrator, Jerry Leeds, is one of these social engineers, an ‘Expeditor’ working for the government sector of Security and Consent (SAC), whose job it is to essentially root out un-American citizens. Information on consumer activities is fed into a giant computer, unofficially nicknamed Herbie, and any dissenters are captured, labeled ‘sick’ and reprogrammed to ‘appropriate’ degrees, sometimes necessitating full frontal lobotomies. We meet Jerry on Depth Interview (DI) Day, the annual day when the cameras are turned, so to speak, on the social engineers and they are forced to wear devices that monitor their every move, right down to their heart rates. Jerry is nervous, but so is everyone, so great is their paranoia that ‘Herbie’ will find something amiss in their daily routine that would cause them to be considered ‘sick.’


Jerry’s DI day routine gives us a brief overview of the world, which essentially boils down to only two major powers—the democratic Americans and the Communist Russians, with other lesser republics in between. While Crossen doesn’t hesitate to vilify Communism, he also doesn’t glorify the democracy he finds himself living in. In fact, one is almost drawn as critically as the other. Jerry identifies with a third group—the ragtag underdog known as the United Nations (Uns), a group existing primarily in Australia, the only refuge for the only sanity left in the world, apparently (In what is probably Crossen’s most glaring inaccurate view of the future, he has envisioned an Australia where everything ISN’T trying to kill you!).  On DI Day, Jerry receives orders from his totally indoctrinated boss, Roger Dillon, to capture a fugitive 'Uns' leader known as ‘Paul Revere.’ It is not a very subtle book, so you don’t even have to read past that sentence to know that Jerry has been tasked with capturing himself.


And so the adventure is set as Jerry must somehow evade his own oppressive, nosy government to protect his identity. I won’t go into the details but he is successful, though his simple-minded girlfriend Nancy finds herself lobotomized before the week is up, for merely wishing to herself that a Communist dissenter escape custody. Later on, poor Nancy a forgotten casualty, Jerry hooks up with a more spirited woman, Meg, who initially gave me some hope that she might represent her sex a little better. For a minute there, it seemed like she might break with the traditions of woman’s passive role in fiction and reveal herself to be a fellow undercover Uns, or at least an active convert who aids Jerry... but then I remembered this was 1954. I’m sure Crossen felt portraying Nancy and Meg as sympathetic victims seemed fair at the time, but in 2013 (and even in 1990), it’s a little disappointing to see women dragged around like props. It is my hope to find a science fiction novel written by a man before 1970 in which women were not merely passive participators, but I don’t suppose this was a popular viewpoint then. Hell, it’s not even acceptedthroughout science fiction today.


The social engineers don’t just capture the ‘sick’ dissenters. The SAC is also responsible for designing the culture that Herbie considers most acceptable, based on collected data. Herbie decides what the most acceptable foods are to eat, what clothes to wear, what music to listen to, and this all adds up to the quintessential American. Nobody is forbidden to go outside the norm, per se, but it is strongly discouraged, as it will all go into your profile and determine whether you qualify for a lobotomy. As a result, we end up with a culture of zombies and people afraid to be different for fear of getting noticed and labeled. Opinions may vary, but I don’t think this reflects the U.S. of today, because the 70s did a decent job of popularizing the minority opinion so that rejecting the norm is almost as popular as accepting it today, but in the fear-steeped 1950s United States where information was limited and Communism was a very palpable threat, I can see how this opinion would be one that would get into the hearts of readers.


I did find a prescient quality to the DI Day cameras and Herbie, the computer that devours all the minutiae and knows everything about you. It’s rare today when someone can exist without at least some kind of online presence. What Crossen failed to predict, though, was that while the U.S. of his making was under mandatory close surveillance of our thoughts and actions, the real population of today willingly offered up this information ourselves. For either outcome—real or fictional—however, we are the only ones to blame for allowing things to be what they’ve become. In Year of Consent, Jerry and Meg have an opportunity to escape and start a new life in Australia, but Jerry chooses to stay, knowing that his work is not done. The SAC is hellbent on introducing their latest social manipulation into mainstream—creating an unconscious correlation between their two greatest enemies through CommUNism, a word which inextricably causes people to associate the U.N. dissenters with the Communist threat. If it is allowed to come to fruition, Jerry’s sacrifices might be all for naught. It is kind of striking to realize that this ploy of the SAC’s—this stupid, baseless plan borne of ignorance and fear—is not very different from the fear mongering of networks like Fox news over the past decade. Media manipulation, it seems, is nothing new, and this is precisely why novels like this—in many ways outdated—are still relevant today.


When it’s all said and done, the greatest attack on bureaucracy is to be as individualistic as possible, social norms be damned. Jerry Leeds is at the heart of a movement encouraging people to reject what society tells you is ‘normal’ and be whomever you so desire. It’s a sentiment that serves to be both anti-Communist and anti-whatever-the-extreme-reaction-to-anti-Communism-turns-out-to-be. An important lesson in not letting your fear dictate your thoughts and actions, because extreme reactions in either direction are equally destructive. In other words, THIS IS HOW WE LET THE TERRORISTS COMMUNISTS WIN, people!