BLOGGING CATCHING FIRE, pt. 1: The Terrible Swift Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword

I totally hated Catching Fire, until I loved it. The first half--the first two-thirds, even!--are maddening, occasionally VERY sloppily written, and also a little racist? We’ll get into it.

Part 1: The Spark

[Here’s the deal: I have a bit to say about the aforementioned troubling material in Catching Fire, but not necessarily a lot of formal shit to say about like, the rest of the series (the parts I liked, in other words). But I would like to hear your thoughts! So look for a few open-thread discussions in the coming days. Bring your A commenting game, ya heard? And today, feel free to not address anything I mention here if there's other stuff in Part 1 you want to talk about. Instead. I'm DTF, as the kids say. Wait, that might not apply here.]

We pick up with Katniss a few weeks after the end of the Hunger Games. She and Peeta are living relatively large in their new houses in the Victor’s Village--shit’s weird between them for like a day and then they work it out, sort of. I mean, you didn’t expect Suzanne Collins to allow anything to seem definite for more than a few pages, right? Katniss and Peeta were quite obviously at odds at the end of the last book, and that won’t do. We have to get them back to “sort of at odds and maybe sort of in love but unwilling to maybe say so even to themselves maybe!” So we get back to there, and Gale is kicking around but not really because he works in the coal mine most of the week--I think FoxConn does the scheduling for that shit--and everything is OK for a little while. Victors are apparently supposed to pursue hobbies, and Peeta channels his passion for frosting cakes into something a little less weirdly specific: painting. Katniss is too lazy-angry to develop an actual skill so she gets Cinna to ghost-draw dresses for her (he sends her all his stoned reject sketches and she passes them off as her own for the press). Meanwhile Haymitch wanders drunkenly around through the background of scenes, bumping into furniture. (When Haymitch got back from the Games I bet his chosen skill was “moonshinery.”) All of this is conveyed in that weird, Proust-for-people-who-don’t-like Proust present tense-flashback shit as Katniss prepares for something called a “Victory Tour.”

(I predicted, in a video after reading The Hunger Games, that part deux would be like the Real World/Road Rules challenge version of the same story. I was almost right.)

Then The President shows up to tell Katniss she’s a stupid bitch and he hates her. She’s like “huh?” but slowly realizes, over the course of a tour of the districts, that revolution coming, fast. And her first, survival-focused instinct is to find a way to keep it from happening.

Things fall apart very quickly. Suzanne Collins sets up the Victory Tour plot and we, the readers, are perfectly happy to settle in for that story. Which is why it is kind of bewildering when Collins skips over all of it, literally publishing what reads like an outline of a few chapters:

Cinna begins to take in my clothes around the waist. The prep team frets over the circles under my eyes. Effie starts giving me pills to sleep, but they don’t work. Not well enough. I drift off only to be roused by nightmares that have increased in number and intensity. Peeta, who spends much of the night roaming the train, hears me screaming as I struggle to break out of the haze of drugs that merely prolong the horrible dreams. He manages to wake me and calm me down. Then he climbs into the bed to hold me until I fall back to sleep. After that, I refuse the pills. But every night I let him into my bed. We manage the darkness as we did in the arena, wrapped in each other’s arms,  guarding against dangers that can descend at any moment. Nothing else happens, but our arrangement quickly becomes a subject of gossip on the train. 

The grammatical confusion about which events are singular and which are continuous is the least of our problems. I mean, wouldn’t you like to see SOME of this play out in a scene? I’m surprised Suzanne Collins mustered complete sentences! (“And then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens.”-how she writes) One of the many events we blur past is AN ACTUAL (FAKE, BUT TELEVISED) WEDDING between Peeta and Katniss. It’s literally one sentence in the middle of a chapter. Huh? 

Before Suzanne Collins suddenly decides she’s sick of writing about the Victory Tour, however, we do get a brief sketch of the first stop, a tense appearance in District 11. I tried to forget, while I was reading the description of the place, that the actors playing Thresh and Rue in the Hunger Games movie are black. Because it’s more or less a slavery/prison colony. High fences, brutal guards (wearing white!), people hurting their backs and wearing straw hats, working in the fields. I started thinking Suzanne Collins never said they were black Suzanne Collins never said they were black like a mantra. But then Katniss describes Rue’s family, watching her speak from a platform, as “a flock of small dark birds.” UH OH!

And so it’s hard not to read everything after that as well-meaning but wildly racist. Katniss admires Thresh’s wizened-looking grandmother. She looks at Rue’s big family and describes them as “identical” (ha). And a wise old man touches off the moment of rebellion (I loved that Tracy Morgan line in 30 Rock about having extensive experience playing simple old black men who encourage white people to do stuff)--what happens is after Katniss speaks honoring Rue, he whistles a tune, Rue's tune. The crowd starts to push forward, and then the white guards shoot the old man in the head. Ughhhkay.

And Katniss considers their level of brutal treatment and (still in survival mode) frets that the people of D11 would be more likely to start a rebellion than her own people. This maybe wouldn’t be so fresh in my mind if I weren’t listening to David Blight’s (excellent) lectures on the Civil War, but Katniss’s phrase about a spark setting them ablaze sounds like something a paranoid member of the slaveholding class would have said in 1830. Yikes.

Once the Victory Tour is winding down, Katniss and Peeta attend an irritating party in the Capitol. Katniss contemplates what she’s seen (which would maybe be more impactful if we’d seen it too!) and can’t seem to form a coherent opinion about whether or not rebellion is good. Remember how, in The Hunger Games, Katniss recalled walking in the woods with Gale while he talked politics? And how she’d supposedy never really understood what he was saying? Once again, Katniss, our supposedly strong female narrator, defers to men for her political opinions; Peeta thinks that rebellion might not be a bad thing, and Katniss decides to agree.

That happens at the abrupt conclusion of the tour, during this fairly ridiculous section where Katniss and Peeta find out that Capitol partygoers like a drink that makes you vomit--they use it so they can keep eating food all night long. Katniss and Peeta are appalled, and Suzanne Collins takes a long time explaining how the drink works, which is weird since like, it exists in real life. It’s called Ipecac, and if you want to have some fun, search it on YouTube sometime! Anyway, note Suzanne Collins’s wide-ranging, vague distaste for excess. That’ll be important later.

ANYWAY Katniss and the gang return to District 12, where shit slowly gets more and more totalitarian. A new Peacekeeper shows up and whips Gale almost to death for hunting in the woods. The black market where Katniss used to hang out burns to the ground. Rage Against The Machine starts playing on the soundtrack.

But it still takes like another 100 pages before this book gets good.