Media Consumption, Young Adult Fiction
Mockingjay: Good End to a Great Series
This blog is filled with spoilers, from one end to the other, so stop now if you care about that kind of thing.
SPOILERS! SPOILERS!
Well, now that those people are gone, we can talk about things openly. (Man, I hate those guys.)
First, I just need to make a complaint. I like to support bookstores and such, but I ended up trying to buy this book at Walmart (because I work in a cultural wasteland that has no bookstores, and I was buying this on my lunch break). (That cultural wasteland is: West Valley City.) Anyway, Walmart failed me. They didn’t have Mockingjay anywhere–no displays, no shelf space, no anything–and this was the day after the book came out! I had to go next door to the Sears Grand, if you can imagine. They seemed shocked to have a customer (and rightly so, because their shelves were mostly empty). But, they had Mockingjay, and I purchased it, and the fourteen dollars I paid doubled that store’s revenue for the entire week.
But on to the book.
I loved it, and it bugged me. But mostly I loved it.
My loves are many, but the biggest thing that I liked about the book is that it was written honestly. Mockingjay was the natural conclusion to The Hunger Games. Any society that would treat it’s children as is protrayed in the first book, would do equally cruel things elsewhere, and overthrowing that society would reveal the worst elements of it. So, while some people have complained about the gore and the shock, I think they were absolutely necessary, and I really couldn’t imagine the book without them.
But as far as natural conclusions go, I think Suzanne Collins excelled far beyond the requirements of the setting. Elana Johnson and I were recently talking about Hunger Games, and how the dystopian world was created. One worldbuilding technique for dystopia is to take a troublesome aspect of our culture, extend it out to it’s furthest, most dangerous conclusion, and look at the consequences. Using this model, I simplistically said that Hunger Games is an extension of our love for reality TV and voyeurism. Elana looked at it much deeper: it’s not just about reality TV, but it’s about using the media to control people.
Collins took that theme–controlling the populace through propaganda–and took it to its natural conclusions as well. Katniss has been a propaganda puppet in every book, though managed in a different way. In Hunger Games, she’s somewhat independent, but controlled by Haymitch, who teaches her how to perform on camera (and rewarding her when she creates the right TV story). In Catching Fire, she’s controlled by Snow, performing on camera to prove that she’s not a rebel leader–she’s just a girl in love. And in Mockingjay, she’s now controlled by the rebel government (which isn’t so much good, but the lesser of two evils), and she’s followed from photo-op to photo-op by stylists and producers.
(It’s worth noting that every propaganda campaign is foiled when Katniss rejects the control of her puppeteers–attempting suicide, destroying the force field, and killing Coin. She did all of it on camera, taking temporary control of the propaganda message being spread.)
So, to me, all of this kind of thing is what really makes the book work. There are smaller aspects of the plot and characters that I questioned, but it’s this ongoing consistency of the deeper themes and messages that really make Mockingjay a great conclusion.
I’m only going to quickly touch on the characters, since I didn’t really have any issues with them. I think that Katniss is also the natural continuation of Katniss–she’s exactly how we should have expected her to be. I think that there was a feeling among fans and internet forums that this book was going to be the romantic culmination: Team Peeta vs. Team Gale. But, while that is an interesting element of the book, I don’t think anything in the previous two books have led us to expect romantic happy endings. Katniss has been Katniss since the first chapter of the first book, and her actions and motivations have remained very consistent.
(Sidenote: From a storytelling perspective, I’ve never understood the Team Gale crowd. While Katniss liked him, he’s never had enough significant screen time for the readers to get to like him, and a romance where the readers don’t feel emotionally connected is the touch of death. So, I think that most Team Gale people were deluding themselves. They were Team Gale because they didn’t like Peeta; they liked the idea of Gale, not the actual character.) (TAKE THAT, TEAM GALE JERKS.)
(Another sidenote: I thoroughly enjoyed Peeta rediscovering Katniss and learning that she’s kind of a jerk. He’s always put up with her crap, because he’s in love with her, but when he’s no longer in love with her, he realizes that she’s always treated him terribly. I found that phase in his recovery delightful.) (This is not to say that I dislike Katniss. I just think it was a clever turn.)
A few problems:
I have two main complaints with Mockingjay, and they both have to do with the final third. First, it was hard to suspend my disbelief with all the “pods” in the Capitol. To have so many of them, and so creative and wacky, all over the place would have been insanely expensive and logistically impossible. (For example: the Meat Grinder or the street that opens up–when did they build those massive crazy things? How did they keep it a secret from the populace? How did could they afford them all (because, presumably, there are wacky, enormous things like the Meat Grinder all over the Capitol).
Second, and more important, everything that happens in the final third–from the point where Katniss enters the Capitol and heads for Snow–is ultimately a failure that doesn’t accomplish anything and costs a lot of lives. The government would have been overthrown just as effectively if she hadn’t gone (because the rebels get to Snow at the same time Katniss does). I have no problem with her failing; I just didn’t like that her failure didn’t mean anything. Nothing was gained, and the losses were only chalked up to “War sure stinks”, not “Katniss wasted all their lives for nothing”.
But, all of that said, I think this was a phenomenal book, and a really groundbreaking series. It’s always nice to see dystopia do well, but this one brought a whole new audience to the genre, and then kicked the genre’s butt.
What I’ve Been Up To
I haven’t blogged as much as usual in the last few weeks (not that I blogged much before). I’ve decided that rather than form a coherent thought, I’d catch you up on my comings and goings in bullet-point form.
Yellowstone
I recently went on a whirlwind trip to Yellowstone. All summer we’ve been promising the kids that we’d go camping, but all manner of time commitments have stood in our way, so two weeks ago we packed up and spent a quick weekend watching water boil.
By strict definition, it wasn’t “camping”. One night we stayed in a one-room cabin in the woods, and the other night we stayed in the Marriott. But, we totally looked at trees out the window, and I think there was a show about nature on our plasma screen TV.
Being August, there wasn’t a lot of wildlife to be seen. If you go to Yellowstone in early summer all the elk and buffalo are hanging out by the roads, hoping to see and be seen. But by August they’ve decided they hate tourists. This is all normal and we’ve experienced it before (we go to Yellowstone a lot). What we haven’t experienced before is that all the geysers were taking summer vacation, too. My theory is that there’s less water due to the hot weather, so they don’t erupt as much, but the other theory is that we didn’t spend a ton of time and our lack of patience was our downfall. Either way, the hikes were dull, with no geysers, just steamy puddles. That said, we managed to see all the animals we wanted to, including a huge grizzly on the shoulder of the road. They were just fewer and far between.
The Emergency Room
My next trip was to the ER on a Sunday evening. In the morning I’d been experiencing some weird symptoms which I described to my wife as “a migraine without the headache”. It was all nausea and pressure and lightheadedness. Then, at church, she said I looked pale and my lips were blue, so I went home and discovered my blood pressure was really high. (Those of you who know me might not be surprised at the high blood pressure, since I shower in bacon grease every morning, but I’ve actually never had high blood pressure in my entire life, ever. And yet this was REALLY high.)
Me having a headache. Aren't I cute?
And then the kicker: after a few hours of weird symptoms and high blood pressure, my face started to go numb. A quick consultation with Dr. Internet indicated that I was having a stroke and that I needed to visit the hospital and an estate lawyer.
Fortunately for all, it wasn’t a stroke. I had an EKG and a CT scan, and the doctor and nurse had a long conversation where they tried to find something sharp to run across the bottoms of my feet. In the end, I can’t remember what they chose. But I flinched several times during the conversation, so it wasn’t needed.
The ultimate verdict was: A Complex Migraine. It’s like a migraine, but with more random crap they can’t explain. Then they paged the crazy doctor for a consult, and he came in and told me that my body was filled with toxins caused by aspartame and food additives, and the only possible therapy was to give me an expensive placebo (and to make me an independent placebo distributor!) Or maybe I made that part up. But it was a Complex Migraine.
The Edits
The first round of edits for Variant are in the bag, and I still have a few days before the second round begins. Overall, the edits weren’t bad at all. They certainly weren’t like my third book, when the main edit was “We like it, but make it more like The Da Vinci Code.”
There were three main revisions, one of which was to knock off the repitition. And, as I looked at my editor’s notes, I discovered that I repeat stuff constantly. Constantly. I repeat stuff constantly. What I’m trying to say is that when I say a thing, I will repeat it. Constantly.
We’re Moving
I move a lot. In ten years of marriage, we’ve had nine different addresses (though that includes a few quick little moves, like when we house-sat for someone for four months, and when I interned for my MBA). This time, however, we’re moving to a far more stable place–a house. It’s a marvelous house in a good area with a big yard. It was built and decorated in the fifties, and it has a fine selection of gold and baby-blue carpet.
Also, we discovered yesterday, it has a chubby rat lounging on the back lawn. So, hooray! Watch out, Mrs. Frisby! The exterminators are on the way!
Another thing the house has: a walnut tree. I cut open one of the fruit to figure out what it was (because it looked green and round, not walnutish) and the juice permanently stained my hand. It’s been six days. Dang walnuts.
Anyway, the important thing about moving into a house is that now you can help me carry the piano up the front steps. Come one and all.
My Job is to Make You Happy
Last night I went to a Natalie Merchant concert. While I know that it likely qualifies me as unmanly, Natalie Merchant is my favorite musician of all time, with the possible exception of The Beatles. She’s recently released her first studio album in seven years, and this was the first time I’ve ever had a chance to see her live.
It was awesome, of course. The music was phenomenal, and she was great–energetic and entertaining.
And, as I was sitting there in the amphitheater, I thought about writing (because I’m always thinking about writing) and how the structure of the concert related to writing a novel.
A little quick background on Natalie Merchant’s music: If we’re judging popularity based on radio performance, she was at her popularity peak early in her career, when she was the lead singer with 10,000 Maniacs and then with her first solo album, Tigerlily. Since that time she has moved out of mainstream pop and into other less commercially popular genres. Initially (with Motherland) it was in a more blues/rock direction, but then she dove headfirst into folk. Her 2003 album had old hymns and ballads, and her latest, Leave Your Sleep, is a collection of childrens poems set to music. It’s all really fantastic, amazing music, but it’s not anything you’d hear on the radio.
So, back to the concert. Natalie appeared without any dramatic entrance, strolling up to the microphone and launching into one of the songs off the new album–one of the poem songs.
The venue, Red Butte Gardens, is an outdoor amphitheater where you bring blankets and sit on the grass. You can bring your own food (and alcohol) and there were hundreds of little picnic dinner parties going on as the show started. And, since the concert was delayed more than an hour because of rain and lightning, the audience had had plenty of time to get preemptively drunk.
And, here’s the other thing I noticed about the audience: it didn’t seem like many people knew her music. They were fans of 10,000 Maniacs, or the mid-nineties solo albums, but not any of her non-radio songs. No one around me seemed to recognize anything from the new album–and the new stuff made up the entire first half of the show.
I was a little annoyed with the crowd, because it felt like no one was paying much attention to these new songs–and they’re really great songs, and the 8-piece band was fantastic.
But then, perhaps sensing the crowds detachment, she launched into a couple faster, more-upbeat songs. They weren’t her old radio hits, but you could definitely dance to them. And the crowd responded. People started getting up on their feet, crowding down toward the stage. And, after one particularly successful song that really engaged the crowd, she declared “Let’s do it again!” and was met with cheers.
And then she said: “My job is to make you happy.”
I had been annoyed with the crowd all of this time, because they weren’t fluent in Natalie’s songlist and they weren’t trying hard enough to get into the slower, more-unusual songs. But Natalie didn’t see it that way. She saw it as her responsibility to get the crowd engaged. And, when she saw what they wanted, she altered her performance to give it to them. (And, once they were engaged, she was able to give them more of what she wanted, too.)
It made me think about the responsibilities of an author and the role of the audience. I think a lot of the time we get it backwards. I’m not saying that there’s no place for books that are challenging might take some effort to get into, nor am I saying that we need to write pure fan service.
What I am saying is that readers don’t owe authors anything. No matter how famous the writer is, or how critically acclaimed and well-loved, readers are under no obligation to care. They don’t buy books because of charity. It’s not the reader’s job to make the author feel good. Instead, like Natalie Merchant said at the concert: “My job is to make you happy.” We, as authors, need to give readers a reason to care. We need to get you engaged, not just expect that engagement will happen without effort.
Media Consumption, Variant, Writing
Too Much vs. Not Enough
A couple months ago, I wrote a blog post making fun of Lost. I had watched the first season, but gave up fairly early into the second when it appeared the writers weren’t really going to answer anything. I know that Lost fans will disagree, so I offer the disclaimer: yes, I know that they kinda, sorta explained things throughout the show and kinda, sorta explained everything at the end. But that doesn’t mean much to me, because I had given up on it by then. My complaint was not that the writers couldn’t surprise us with an explanation, but that it didn’t seem like they were planning on it. It felt weird for the sake of weird. It didn’t feel like an intricate mystery; it felt random.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because I’m revising Variant and one of my editor’s comments is that we need just a smidgen more explanation/foreshadowing/clues. Not too much–we don’t want to give all the mysteries away–but we need more than what’s there. It’s like my complaint with Lost: I don’t mind a difficult mystery, but I want to feel like it’s going somewhere. I want to be assured that there actually is an answer, and I just need another clue or two before I can figure it out.
I’ve always been fascinated by the questions that never get answered, and I think there’s a fine balance between not enough explanation and too much.
Back in high school I read The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux, but when I think back on it I rarely think about Raoul or Christine or even the Phantom. Instead, my favorite part is a tiny section of Chapter 20, where Raoul and The Persian are venturing down into the depths of the opera house:
Then the Persian took Raoul up the stairs again; but suddenly he stopped him with a gesture. Something moved in the darkness before them.
“Flat on your stomach!” whispered the Persian.
The two men lay flat on the floor.
They were only just in time. A shade, this time carrying no light, just a shade in the shade, passed. It passed close to them, near enough to touch them.
They felt the warmth of its cloak upon them. For they could distinguish the shade sufficiently to see that it wore a cloak which shrouded it from head to foot. On its head it had a soft felt hat….
It moved away, drawing its feet against the walls and sometimes giving a kick into a corner.
“Whew!” said the Persian. “We’ve had a narrow escape; that shade knows me and has twice taken me to the managers’ office.”
“Is it some one belonging to the theater police?” asked Raoul.
“It’s some one much worse than that!” replied the Persian, without giving any further explanation.
And that’s it. That’s all we see of this “shade in the shade”. We’re left with the mystery: who could be “much worse” than the police, but somehow helpful to the opera? How is there a second mysterious figure lurking under the opera house, yet who is completely uninvolved in the current kidnapping and rescue?
I love this character–it works so well. First, it gives us an illusion of depth: there is much more going on below the opera than we previously thought–the phantom isn’t the only scary thing down there; he’s just part of a larger scary setting. And the unexplained mystery can be left unexplained: we’ll find out the phantom’s secrets in great detail, and our main plot will be resolved, but we’re not going to find out everything. Just like we talked about with Jaws, we’re not afraid of a big shark, we’re afraid of the unknown. So, even though the phantom eventually becomes known, there is still plenty of unknown to keep things creepy–and to keep us thinking and wondering.
On the other end of the Spectrum Of Unexplained Mysteries: Eric D. Snider wrote a great article about the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Anyone who’s seen the movie knows it’s cryptic and strange. The last time I saw it, I was about 14 and I don’t remember it making any sense at all. I’d be interested to watch it now and see how my perception of it has changed. In an interview, Stanley Kubrick, the director, stated that the mysteries should NEVER be explained:
How much would we appreciate La Gioconda [The Mona Lisa] today if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: “This lady is smiling slightly because she has rotten teeth” — or “because she’s hiding a secret from her lover.” It would shut off the viewer’s appreciation and shackle him to a “reality” other than his own. I don’t want that to happen to 2001.
So, we have all these differing degrees of mystery: Lost, where it doesn’t look like we’re ever going to get answers, but we (kinda, sorta) do; Phantom of the Opera, where the main mystery is completely and thoroughly explained, but other secrets lurk in the background; and “2001: A Space Odyssey”, where no answers are given and interpretation is left up to the viewer. (And, on the other end of the spectrum, we have stories like “The Sixth Sense”, where you learn The Big Secret, and say “OH! Well, that explains EVERYTHING!”)
And I bring all of this up to say: I’m still struggling with this stupid balance between Too Much Explanation and Not Enough Explanation. This revision is going very well except for this last issue. I think my editor and I are going to be discussing this in depth.
What are your thoughts? Do you like mysteries left hanging? Or do you like everything explained? What are your favorite examples?
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Erin: I loved this book. I wanted it to end all roses a...
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Amy @ My Friend Amy: This is a really great review and while I didn't h...
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ticktock: Yes the rebels would have won regardless, but I do...
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admin: Yeah, Annette, but Katniss would have been there a...
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Annette Lyon: Excellent post. I agree especially about the pods-...
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