It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. I’ve been full of cold, and because I’m in the middle of an editing pass on one of my own terrible manuscripts, I decided it was more important to maintain momentum on that. Writing these is easy and fun, but if I stop editing then it takes me ages to get back on the horse.
I didn’t know how to feel about this book while I was reading it, and I still don’t, really.
Was this on my TBR? NOPE. But technically it should have been, because I did read the first one and I always intended to read the others!
I probably don’t have much interesting to say about this one, because I pure enjoyed it and that tends to make for dull book thoughts. Tell me again how scintillating the prose, how unputdownable, how twisty the plot and well-rounded the characters. Sing, O muse, of the suspenseful chapter, the flawed yet relateable protagonist who sailed across wine-dark space and made you think about the interaction of AI and human in an entirely new light while at the same time having some rollicking adventures and getting involved in some first-class scheming!
“No, Mom, that’s just a drone. You can’t see the Moon until night, usually,” replied her left-daughter Balance, rolling her eyes.
“How long will that be?”
“Hey!” Balance’s right-mother Ingenuity stopped, almost tripping her skittering suitcase up. “It’s a green-tree! Balance, take our photo with the green-tree!”
“Urgh, Muv, come on! You’re acting like tourists!” Balance pointed across the crowded plaza to a shimmering ziggurat, leaf-green and bark-brown. “Let’s drop the bags off at my dorms, and then you can look at all the trees you want.”
“Just take our photo, come on! I want to send it to the crew back home.” Ingenuity and Fortitude linked arms and stood in front of the tree smiling.
“Here, I’ll take it.” Joie-de-Vivre, Balance’s cross-sister, pointed at her mothers and tapped the back of her hand. “There we… wait, hold on.” A group of men walked through her sightline, wearing musical instruments like turtle shells on their backs. “OK. There we go. Posted and tagged.” She turned and watched the musicians disappear into the crowd, necks of their bass cases bobbing like periscopes over the hairy sea. “It’s so busy here. I’ve never seen so many people.”
“And so many men!” added Ingenuity. “What’s that like?”
And here we are, at the end of everything.
It’s been a good, four month journey, and I have learned many things that have actually really helped my German along. The last words I liked the most are perhaps apt for the Hunger Games as a whole, and the world Collins (and her translators, Sylke Hachmeister and Peter Klöss) describe.
verschnörkelt: baroque, ornate
schmuddelig: grubby
Here’s to the next German book!
The penultimate chapter! Ahhhh!
Confession: the reason I don’t have much to say is that I just read Bandi’s The Accusation and I’m saving up all my oppressive regime thoughts for the upcoming post.
geheimniskrämerisch: secretive (how apt!)
Was this book on my TBR? NOPE. But we were on a long train journey and I’d finished The New York Trilogy and it was either work on my own manuscript or steal Spuggy’s book.
There was really only one choice in this chapter.
die Rumpf: torso (among other things, but here it was used to mean “torso”). Another one of those delightful words that do not look like they should mean what they mean.
Oh my goodness. This book marks a great milestone in my TBR list, and also serves to show just how behind I am (and getting behinder all the time, as this year seems to be the year of Reading Books Not On My TBR). This book was recommended to me on my honeymoon in Morpeth, by a lad at the Waterstones there. That was in October 2015.
I wish I could go back to Morpeth and tell that man how right he was. What a good book.
Rereading The Hunger Games so closely, I really have to hand it to Collins. She brings across the sheer injustice, the unfairness of life in Panem, without ever overtly saying “this is unfair”. That is “show not tell”ing. Katniss’s ability to outsmart trouble in the Arena is behaviour that wins her admiration and praise from her Capitol watchers, but when she gets around the rule change suddenly it’s not so cute. Essentially what happens is that the Gamemakers position themselves as a threat within the confines of the Arena, and they don’t like it when they’re treated in the appropriate way (the way that they themselves have driven all these kids to react to such threats, no less).
What makes this twist stand out is that Katniss has all this time never entertained political thoughts. She’s overtly non-political, as we saw on the rooftop of the training centre. It’s not treated as a poke in the eye to the Capitol, but as a pure survival tactic, and that it proceeds to be punished so ruthlessly is what makes the world of Panem feel so horrendous. It’s a good evocation of a totalitarian world that really rules by terror, and in particular the kind of terror that relies on a network of arbitrary invisible rules, the least infringement of which will result in dire consequences for anyone even remotely connected.
I’d also say this is why so much other (recent) YA dystopian fic fails. They try to emulate the Hunger Games, but only the spectacle. All circus, no bread. It’s all about tests and competition-to-the-death, and no one else has managed to capture the fear that Collins evokes so well. No other YA revolution fic that I’ve read has managed to capture the sheer grubbiness of how Panem is won back, the fakery, the lies, the way Katniss is manipulated from beginning to end – and is punished even there for going off-script. God damn, what a good book series. Even with the later worldbuilding issues, it’s pretty fantastic.
Anyway, this is all far in the future. In Chapter 24 we’re still in the Arena, feeling vaguely bad for accidentally poisoning Foxface/Fuchsgesicht and being herded towards Cato…
Best word:
Lunte riechen: to smell a rat (or literally, smell a fuse/match? I guess as though someone’s just lit a bomb fuse? Incidentally, die Lunte is also a fox brush, appropriate for talking of Foxface.)
