Complicity, Moral Ambiguity, and The Hunger Games Prequel (Spoilers!)

When the Hunger Games prequel opened with a narrator from the Capitol, I was like -- "genius!" Finally some literature engaging moral ambiguity and complicity.

If you read the original trilogy, you may remember the basic set up: a bleak future country where the US used to be; a wealthy Capitol and twelve poor districts; to punish the districts for previous acts of war, the capitol carries out the annual Hunger Games. Two adolescents from each district are selected at random to participate in a televised battle to the death. The point is to punish the districts, remind them who is in power, and entertain the Capitol.

And if you read the original trilogy, you may remember that it was narrated by Katniss Everdeen, a teenager from one of the districts selected to be in the Games. She is crafty and intelligent and has a developed moral sensibility whose contours emerge through the books.

This is in no way a criticism of the original trilogy -- which I liked a lot -- but I feel like telling the story from Katniss's point of view is telling a story more on easy-mode. It is just more straightforward to tell a dystopian story of violence and oppression from the point of view of the oppressed than from the point of view of the oppressor. You get to reel your reader in on the side of the sufferer and the injustices done to them. The reader's sympathies all line up: we like the narrator, we like her cause, we want her to win.

But what if your narrator is on the other side?  

One of the good things about the original trilogy is that in addition to just being good as books, the novels force the reader to engage with moral ambiguity. Katniss is a heroine, but she must perpetrate violence herself as well. Katniss is trapped in situations where all her options are bad.

For me, that ambiguity is such a relief from the modern deluge of entertainment with Good People and Bad People. If you were an alien engaging with US cultural products these days, you'd think humans lived in a world where the Team of Sweet Kindness battles the Forces of Darkness and Pain, and where victory for Team Kindness would lead to a peaceful, verdant utopia.

To me, that bears no resemblance to our world. In our world, almost everything you do in life enmeshes you in dysfunctional global systems with someone on the losing end. If you buy a phone, you're supporting violence where conflict minerals are mined, often by desperate children. If you eat meat, forget it, but even if you eat almonds, or avocados, you're screwing up the ecosystem; and in the US and Canada, even local produce is picked by migrant agricultural workers often forced into situations with no rights and very low pay.

All that is to say that we people in wealth countries are complicit in a range of menacing and even murderous systems.

So -- when I saw the narrator of the prequel was in the Capitol, I was excited, because I thought the book would engage a reflection on wealth and complicity. It does start off in that direction: the narrator Coriolanus is a sympathetic character, an eighteen year-old from a wealthy family reduced to materially poor circumstances. His parents are both dead, and he needs to get into a good university to earn enough to survive and to provide a bit of security to his aging grandmother and hard-working cousin. It's been so long since I read the original trilogy, I didn't even notice, but Coriolanus is Coriolanus Snow, the president from the original books, and this is his backstory. So it's the prehistory of a guy you know will be a central to carrying out the future Games.

I found Coriolanus a sympathetic character at the start -- by which I mean partly that when he was put in bad situations with no good options, I thought those choices were ones I could imagine making or at least understand. I thought centering on a complicit and sympathetic figure was interesting, and something you don't see in literature all that often. We know Coriolanus will end up socially evil, but he starts off personally pretty typical.  

As the plot develops, though, Coriolanus starts acting less like a relatable person in difficult circumstances and more like a familiar old Bad Guy. In the final scenes of the book, he not only throws over his love interest, he tries to hunt her down to kill her, changing his whole mind and plan in a span of a few hours, which doesn't feel like a relatable person facing difficult circumstances but more like an old-fashioned bad guy. I don't know, because I'm not an author, but it seems like it would have been easy to make his story more complex and subtle. Was it more engaging to make him a bad guy? Was it more likely to make for a popular story? I don't know.

In some ways the more interesting subplot in the prequel is that of Sejanus Plinth, who opposes the existence of the games and seems almost like a Good Guy, but whose choices keep leading to terrible outcomes and whose efforts to do good constantly backfire. Now there's a relatable hero for our modern times.

I know there's a fifth book coming. Here's to hoping it centers the moral ambiguity of the trilogy and forces the reader into a bit of discomfort with respect to social evil and the many ways people can be complicit in it.