Her sci-fi series The Hunger Games, which is now a film, has been called a modern classic. Just don't expect the writer schooled in war to revel in the limelight
You just might have noticed The Hunger Games and treated less as a film, more a full-blown phenomenon. Aimed principally at a teenage market, the science-fiction film, the first of a trilogy, is set, film industry observers note, to be bigger than the hugely successful Twilight series. In fact, the worldwide box office on the opening weekend is expected to transform Lionsgate, the mid-size company behind the film (and new owner of Summit, which made the Twilight films) into a major player.
Slightly overlooked in all the hoopla is the young adult novel from which it is adapted and the novel's author, Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games, which was published in 2008 and has spent more than 100 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, is the finest example of the new wave of highly girl-friendly dystopian young adult fiction that has been shining killer sunbeams into the dusty lairs of the vampire fictional menace. For the past few years, there have been several can-do heroines who would wipe their Doc Martens on the face of any vampire foolish enough to come near them.
Collins's heroine, Katniss Everdeen, played in Gary Ross's film by Jennifer Lawrence, is the leader of this pack. Katniss has echoes of Thomas Hardy's Bathsheba in her earthy feistiness. She knows how to live off the land, feed her family and outsmart her twisted masters.
The Hunger Games trilogy (completed by Catching Fire and Mockingjay, and equally appealing to teenage boys) explores the consequences of war, the mechanics of totalitarian states and the cynicism of celebrity culture. Collins's sources include Emile Zola's Germinal, William Golding's Lord of the Flies and the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. The work is not, then, you will gather, some quickly heated series of teen fiction.
As the child of a US Air Force officer, Collins, born in Connecticut in 1962, grew up being educated in the outcome and responsibilities of what she has called "necessary and unnecessary war", which The Hunger Games explores through the rebel army that takes on the ruling government, set in an imagined near future.
Collins's father, who lectured in military history at West Point, left to serve in Vietnam when she was six and returned traumatised. The family was later posted to Brussels and Collins spent her teenage years being led around battlefields, receiving a sense of the reality of war that she is passionate about passing on to her readers. The books hardly shy away from violence and The Hunger Games film is as graphic as a 12A certificate allows (blood digitally removed).
The trilogy has the standard ingredients of dystopian fiction: an ecological disaster followed by civil war paves the way for a totalitarian regime. In this case, the government ruling what remains of North America is modelled on the Roman empire. A well-fed elite in the Capitol condemns the populations of 12 poverty-stricken districts to hard labour, while a 13th district has been depopulated as punishment for rebellion.
The new Roman state is called Panem, after the bread that controls the servile masses. The accompanying circuses are provided by the televised gladiator-style games (mandatory viewing for the population), in which Katniss is one of the "tributes" chosen by lottery to compete to the death.
After a master of fine arts in dramatic writing at New York University, Collins became a writer for children's television, including several Nickelodeon shows in the early 1990s, before moving into writing for children. With her shining grey-blue eyes and cloak of strawberry blonde hair, Collins could play Katniss's mother, concocting healing salves from woodland plants in District 12. When she speaks, she exudes the passionate engagement with ideas that she wants from her readers.
"I want them to ask themselves questions about how elements of the book might be relevant in their own lives, such as, 'How do you feel about the fact that some people take their next meal for granted when so many other people are starving? What's your relationship to reality TV versus your relationship to the news?'"
It was contemplating this relationship while channel-hopping between a reality show ("Young people competing for a million dollars or a bachelor or whatever") and reports of fighting in Iraq ("The lines between these stories started to fuse in a very unsettling way") that sowed the seed of The Hunger Games. Collins remembers connecting TV news reports from Vietnam with her father's absence as a child.
She believes that today's media-friendly youth is overexposed to contrived reality on television, leading to a detachment from images of others' real pain and terror. "Too much of people's lives are put on television and we're desensitised to actual tragedy unfolding before us."
Hence the terrifyingly real games in which the stakes are higher than being embarrassed on primetime TV. Collins's young characters are involved in violent combat and some of them die. "You have to commit fully to writing violent or emotionally challenging scenes. You make that decision at the beginning and stick with it or you write another kind of book."
Her first five-part series of books, The Underland Chronicles (for nine- to 12-year-olds), also featured an assassination, biological weapons, genocide and the use of military intelligence. It is the shock effect of teenagers killing their peers that pushes The Hunger Games into 12A territory. The novels also elicit sophisticated responses to debates on, for example, the cults of personality and its political function. In the novels, the stylists who aim to reinvent Katniss to win her the public support that might save her in the arena are parodies of their own most extreme creations with their gold and silver tattoos, unsettling piercing and whole body tints. Their chief, Cinna, played by Lenny Kravitz in the film, could be hired by Ab Fab's Patsy and Edina tomorrow, yet there is a life-or-death purpose to his excesses.
As the novels progress and the political intrigue becomes as quickfire as the action, Katniss is repackaged many times in her various roles as pin-up girl and propaganda weapon. Both the Panem rulers and their rebel opponents devote much time to their relationships with the masses, whose affections shift towards and away from Katniss. She is in a relationship with another tribute; no she isn't; she is pregnant; no she isn't; she is out of favour; no she isn't. It's as if an editorial conference at Heat magazine was grafted on to an off-the-wall production of Julius Caesar.
This acute sense of the multiple agendas behind the creation of a celebrity may contribute to Collins's own sparing public appearances. She shares with JK Rowling a love of privacy combined with a relish for engaging directly with her readers. Collins and Rowling also have a fascination with ancient civilisations in common, but The Hunger Games seems cut from a different cloth to both the Harry Potter phenomenon and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Collins's world is terrifyingly like our own in its motivation, a mess entirely of muggles' making with only technology and climate change separating us from Panem's President Snow and his warped regime.
Fans have mentioned The Hunger Games in the same breath as classics such as The Giver by Lois Lowry and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. There are better comparisons, though, in the British young adult novel market that are closer to the Katniss saga in spirit. In Saci Lloyd's Carbon Diaries series, a typical stroppy teenage girl is transformed into a reluctant but committed eco-warrior by an environmental crisis that seems only a few degrees away on our society's fragile thermostat. After the Snow by SD Crockett examines a Britain reduced to pre-feudal living conditions, where the survivors are those who have embraced values similar to Katniss's.
If the mainstream entertainment status of The Hunger Games can keep this particular publishing boat afloat, perhaps the vampires that dominated a previous era in teen fiction will stay away. That would mean celebrity status for Suzanne Collins, though she might hate that.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2012/mar/18/suzanne-collins-the-hunger-games-profile
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