This summer, I find myself reading young adult fiction on the bus as inconspicuously as possible, wrapping my arm around the cover in such a way that no one will know its title, and tilting the book just-so, so that no one will see its absurdly large font filling its extremely short chapters.
I am reading Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, and if you must know I am on the third book in the trilogy. If you must also know, I am scouring the internet with great anticipation for news on its film adaptation, clicking on images of its dreamy preteen cast, wondering if I’ll be too old and embarrassed to see it in the theatre. This is not something I’m proud of.
How did I reach such a state of biblio-depravity? It started out innocently enough; I came across a New York Times article, “Teenage Girls in a Dystopian World,” and it made the mind reel with possibilities. I thought the touted female authors may prove to be subversive progenies of Margaret Atwood, adhering to Atwood’s unique brand of feminist dystopia found in some of my favorites like The Handmaid’s Tale or Year of the Flood, yet cleverly eliciting the parlance of the Twilight-reading set. I thought the article was heralding a new genre of teen dystopia where, as in Atwood’s stories, we are shown a government that relegates women into categories based upon the functionality of their bodies: sexual reproduction, sexual pleasure, subservient marriage partner, and variations thereof. A world where the female body is nothing but a vessel of the State; a world that, to me, felt so real upon reading about, that it almost seemed like prophecy when scanning news headlines: Planned Parenthood dismantled, feticide laws that criminalize miscarriages passed; or, going back a few years, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, insisting upon keeping a comatose, quadriplegic woman on life support after 17 years, justifying his stance by saying, “She could still give birth to a son!”
I showed the article about this new genre to my Canadian friend, an extreme Atwood enthusiast, and we were in the bookshop in no time, beginning our own two-lady book club.
We scoured the Young Adult section like scavengers, drawn to the metallic and glittery covers with their fantastical, over-produced designs. Not unlike my under-stimulated preteen self, I found that I was drawn to covers beaming with the promise of hot teen sex, or at least glamorous stories of illicit drug abuse. Today I was looking for something with a bit more substance, but hey, a few scintillating scenes of heavy petting à la Judy Blume’s Forever would be an added bonus.
She chose Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, and I chose Ally Condie’s Matched. Apparently my companion’s book was highly entertaining, its characters housed in a world where love is considered a virus and all teens must take a vaccination shot to rid themselves of it. I found my book, Matched, somewhat entertaining, but ultimately ineffectual and dull as a vehicle for dystopia. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but the author’s work was in fact highlighted in the Times as a hot new teen dystopia, so I only assumed it would be a noteworthy addition to the genre.
Don’t get me wrong, this book was insightful — it showed me everything that a dystopian story should not be: slow-paced, patronizing, and uncomfortably wholesome. This book obviously took the Brave New World concept of dystopia as utopia run amok, a future where one radical ideology for the perfect utilitarian society implodes and you, the reader, can witness its swift demise as if it were a spectator sport. If executed properly, this should be a thrilling experience.
But like I said, this story is slow-paced; there was never enough action, even though the plot demanded it. Matched is a tale of a high tech supposed utopia ruled by a totalitarian regime that operates on highly advanced algorithms. Through these algorithms, as well as the aid of periodic IQ tests, its citizens are matched with life partners at the age of 16 and assigned a career as well. Oh yeah, and everyone must partake in compulsory euthanasia on a state sanctioned date. So when the main character’s grandfather dies and leaves her the Dylan Thomas poem “Do not go gentle into that good night,” it is implied that she is having a political awakening of sorts. Only it all unfolds so damned slowly, and the threat of violence is so ill-defined, it’s incredibly dull.
Fittingly, Matched has been optioned for a film adaptation by Disney.
This is probably an unfair snap judgment. After all, the book is a love story more than anything, and one meant for a teen audience at that. But it wasn’t the gripping, powerful social commentary on the female condition that I had been searching for.
The Hunger Games proves that today’s teen demographic demands more. We have the story of 16 year-old Katniss Everdeen, a citizen of one of 12 districts, assigned by manufacturing sector, which services an elite bubble called The Capitol. She’s in the coal mining district, one of the lowest stratum in existence since its citizens are malnourished and working conditions go unregulated. With her father dead from a mining explosion and her mother partially insane, Katniss becomes the sole breadwinner by hunting wild game with her trusty bow and arrow and developing survival skills that you know will be tested. So when her name is drawn to “play” in a nationally-televised battle to the death among other child district representatives, all for the entertainment of The Capitol, you can feel the threat of survival intensifying as we follow our heroine on her journey from lonely outsider to whip-sharp badass to public enemy #1.
Unlike Matched or Delirium, The Hunger Games doesn’t hint at the underlying brutality citizens suffer as a consequence of nonconformity within a police state; it presents brutality as an immediate threat that motivates desperate citizens, citizens living under the microscope of its ruthless, ideologically-flawed overlords. And the Hunger Games’ author seems to know that an audience of Millenials is fully aware of the war and brutality that surrounds them. Collins was reportedly inspired to write her story after flicking the channels back and forth between news reports from Iraq and reality television shows. She then created the literary equivalent of a mash-up by throwing in the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to create her Games.
But while the story delves into themes of class warfare, institutionalized brutality, and loss of childhood innocence, female angst need not be injected into the overarching narrative: the mere fact that the story centers on a teenage girl who is neither boy crazy, fashion/grooming obsessed (we find our heroine completely disgusted by the band of stylists she must contend with before she is televised), or waiting for someone to save her, is a feminist concept in and of itself.
Needless to say, the sanitization of real world brutality in a dystopia story is tantamount to condescension to modern young adult audiences, and it also removes the story’s teeth, rendering the narrative ineffectual. I wondered if The Hunger Games could one day resonate with readers the way Orwell’s 1984 did for so many teens before it. I found myself rereading We, the novel that inspired 1984, to think through what elements make for a compelling dystopia.
Written in 1921 yet not published in his native Russia until the 1980s, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is easily the prototype to all 20th Century totalitarian dystopias, replete with panoptic architecture, 24-hour surveillance allusions, and a precursor to Orwell’s Newspeak, whereby a birth name is replaced with a number and where the main character, D-503, thinks within the confines of mathematical allegories rather than Orwell’s more heady doublethink.
Zamyatin was at a fascinating point in history when he sat down to write We. Having witnessed two revolutions, he had become disgusted by both the propaganda of the Bolsheviks and the police state mentality of the Soviets. Later, his work on the English shipyards of Newcastle undoubtedly informed his outlook on industrialization and the loss of individualism, harkening back to Marx’s theory of alienation. Managing to harness these experiences into one poetic satire, Zamyatin created a work that is enduringly funny, but above all else, it held a message of urgency.
It is that sense of urgency that lifts a story from the zeitgeist and into the realm of classic when it comes to the dystopia. It takes a sense of vision bordering on prophecy. I think that all these elements are present in The Hunger Games.
Its main character, Katniss Everdeen, may be a simple 16 year-old wielding a bow and arrow, killing her way through opponents on a reality television show, but the world she must rebel against resembles the same one where Orwell’s Winston Smith once lived. A world that, in the worst of times, we naturally find traces of in our own lives. I’m determined to finish the Games trilogy within the next few days, but I may have to swap covers with We so it won’t be so embarrassing to be seen with in public.
