War! Huh! What Is It Good For (in YA Book Series)?
Warning: I found something on the Internet that annoys me again!
So I just finished Mockingjay, the third book of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy. If you haven’t read it, turn off your computer now and go do it. It is one of the very best series of YA books I’ve read, ever. It starts with Katniss Everdeen, a teenaged girl who lives in a post-apocalyptic world where impoverished Districts are ruled by the decadent and privileged Capitol. As an act of political dominance, the Capitol demands two young tributes from each of its territories every year to compete in a televised death match – a literal Survivor. And it only gets more intense from there.
You’ve probably heard of the other YA book series I’m going to mention, but just in case you haven’t, check it out as well, it’s pretty good: Harry Potter, by J. K. Rowling. It’s full of magical whimsy, interesting characters, and great mysteries.
The reason I want to blog about both these series is in response to a reviewer’s comment on the final installment of Mockingjay. Among other things, she (I think… this is the Internet) mentioned that that she didn’t find Katniss or the political situation around her affecting or realistic at all, and certainly not in the devastating way she’d found the end of the last Harry Potter book.
Being of the complete opposite opinion, I wondered how such a comparison could ever occur to anyone, because to my mind, there is none — Suzanne Collins creates an overwhelming, slightly over-the-top, but painfully plausible political system, and although J. K. Rowling has many admirable authorial virtues, in-depth political analysis is not one of them. Voldemort is a frightening villain, but his plans don’t make the same sinister sense as President Snow’s. President Snow just does evil deeds; Voldemort symbolizes evil itself. These two writers are striving for utterly different kinds of stories.
And then I realized maybe it’s not so strange a juxtaposition after all.
(FROM HERE ON IN, POTENTIAL SPOILERS – THE “HERE IS THE BACK-COVER COPY OF THE LAST BOOK, WHICH MAY REVEAL WHAT HAPPENED IN PREVIOUS BOOKS” KIND, NOT THE “I WILL REVEAL WHAT HAPPENS AT THE END OF THE LAST BOOK, MWA HA HA”! KIND)
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Harry Potter is actually an excellent foil for Katniss Everdeen. Both face similar moral dilemmas throughout their journeys. The ends of both protagonists’ stories culminate in war, and even their epilogues are somewhat similar in tone, if not necessarily in detail. But they live in very, very different worlds.
I am extremely lucky in that I’ve never lived through a war or political upheaval on my home soil. And all I can do is pray that I continue to be so very, very, very lucky. But nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that Collins presents a much more realistic and believable society-at-war that Rowling does.
Maybe it’s because, to the best of my limited knowledge and experience, no one in real life gets the sort of choices Harry does, where he’s not restricted by pesky grey-area worries, like “what is the competent and merciless government going to do to the people I love if I oppose it*?” or “what if there are people in charge who won’t let me do what I want?” Maybe it’s because Collins dismantles all of Panem and leaves it ready to be rebuilt from the ground up while Rowling returns the wizarding world to what is essentially the status quo. Or maybe it’s because right and wrong are so strongly delineated in the Potterverse, as they tend to be when one is fighting pretend idealized Nazis, but in the Hunger Games, there is no right choice, only wrong and less wrong, like the real world where the guilty parties you seek might deliberately use innocent human shields, and there’s always collateral damage.
Where Collins attempts to give a realistic scenario — even going so far as to uncomfortably mirror contemporary first-world culture in the bad guys, not the good**, Rowling is working in metaphor. Collins is constructing — I hate to use the word “fresh” in this context, but there it is — horrific scenarios, fleshing out the details and the logistics of how they work, materially and politically. Rowling uses details to evoke well known real-life horrors, like the Holocaust, but never follows through to show us exactly what horrible things Voldemort intends to do or is doing to the Muggleborns, apart from taking away their wands. “Well,” her story seems to tell us, “you know the rest, right?”
I’m not trying to say that one of these tactics is better than the other, although of course there’s one I preferred as a reader, and despite my best efforts to describe the two fictional wars without bias, you can probably guess which it was. But each of the two authors’ styles lends itself to different kinds of effective writing.
Rowling has created a universe that revolves entirely around Harry, because she seems to wish to deal with morality on an idealized personal level: if you didn’t have to worry about X, Y, and Z, then the right choice is obviously B, not C. Her moral dilemmas resemble thought experiments, pruning away many of the knotty features of real-life problems to allow the principle at stake to shine through. And stories told through metaphor can be more effective for this type of task, getting rid of all the complications to focus on the key concepts.
Collins, on the other hand, seems to be more interested in how an individual can make robust moral choices in a world where one’s actions are restricted by historical events, by the actions of others, and by the political system into which one was born. Although Katniss’s importance in Panem is exaggerated from what might be plausible for a teenager to have in a real-world civil war– because this is, you know, a made-up story about her — other characters still have power, and no one thinks for even a second that she wins or loses the war on her own. Collins can’t get rid of many complicating factors the way Rowling does because they’re important to the themes she’s exploring.
To give you an idea of the difference in tone between these two books, here’s a concept Rowling and Collins have in common: to kill another human being is to cause psychological damage to yourself. Rowling shows this through metaphor — in the Harry Potter series, casting a successful Killing Curse literally tears your soul in two. Collins, on the other hand, shows this through narrative; by book three, the death and destruction that the main characters have both seen and caused have taken their toll. Throughout the entirety of the novels, the reader slowly grasps what taking a life has meant to each of these people, how that fact has changed them. By the end, the reader is invited to admire the strength it’s taken some of the main characters to kill, continue living, and still find reason to strive their best to be good.
The difference in moral focus is also fairly plain to see: for example, Harry and Katniss are both faced with the offer to become the face of the revolution and speak to the population in order to rouse them to support an anti-other-side-of-the-war cause. Each receives this offer from a leader whose policy he or she has come to dislike. Harry rejects it, because he cannot and will not compromise his integrity for someone who’s done wrong, even if they’re on the same side as him. He (and Rowling) interpret this as a moral dilemma that focusses on an individual, Harry, as a free-acting agent, and this beat in the story deals mainly with the conflict between Harry and the politician, rather than the wider consequences of Harry agreeing or not agreeing to do the job.
Contrariwise, Katniss accepts her offer, because she decides that her moral obligation to the population outweighs her personal objections to this individual leader; she couldn’t live with the decision to place her integrity above other people’s wellbeing. Katniss’s choice is based almost entirely on what she perceives to be the outcome of the proposed actions***. She notes various violations of her own personal morals — knows what she would do in an ideal world, like Harry’s — but her struggle is to reconcile those morals with the restrictions placed upon her by reality.
All this is to say two things: first, that as readers and/or writers of YA fiction, we can’t dismiss either style of storytelling as a good way to explore ethical issues, but, secondly and most importantly, that different moral focusses are best treated with certain levels of realism. Using a metaphorical imaginary world makes it difficult to have an interesting discussion about an all-complications-included moral dilemma. For instance, what often irritates me about the Harry Potter series is that the author occasionally seems to want the reader to perceive her highly stylized war as profound, dark, and gritty — to treat it as though it’s a good way to talk about make moral choices within the kinds of real-world restrictions the Hunger Games series tries to reproduce. Similarly, I don’t look to All Quiet on the Western Front for insight on Platonic ideal moral acts, and would be just as irritated if I found its author prodding me into those sorts of conclusions as I read.
In the end, it’s a question of using the proper tools for the proper job — and of recognizing the limitations of one’s favourite tools. It’s fine to use a hammer if you’re driving nails. It’s fine to use a screwdriver if you’re putting in screws. And often you need both in the same types of projects to do different jobs. But, as anyone who is as bad as I am at carpentry can attest, you’ll wind up causing structural damage instead of increasing strength if you try to use one in the task for which the other is best suited.
* Yes, Voldemort “threatens” the Weasleys and all the rest who’ve gone underground, and he kidnaps Luna and Whatsisface the wandmaker. But until the final battle, everyone’s essentially okay, even the people who were imprisoned. You’re either dead, or you’re not, without the difficult middle ground of permanent and debilitating physical and/or psychological damage. And it’s pretty obvious that Voldie couldn’t find his butt with both hands, so families in hiding are probably safe.
** Which is an interesting choice worth its own compare-and-contrast analysis. After all, the clearest real-world analogue to Rowling’s Death Eaters (one she herself has brought up) is Nazism, a great historical villain, certainly, but one of two generations ago, and a movement the author, due to her national history, has no reason to consider anything but a “them”. But how can middle-class Americans and Canadians read about Collins’s decadent Capitol whose privileged and frivolous lifestyle is made possible by the suffering of those in politically weaker and more impoverished regions and not feel at least a twinge of recognition? Is this the real “us”?
*** I guess I could talk superficially about Kantian vs. utilitarian ethical viewpoints. How about not?