I finished reading Suzanne Collins'
A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes this Monday.
I have to admit that my enjoyment of the story, or even willingness to stick with it, was quite tenuous at the beginning. I spent a good part of the novel scared that it would turn out in a way I did not want it to, and in mentally preparing myself to be let down, I wasn't really taking in the story I was being told. Instead of reading the book in front of me, I was reading a story I thought I was getting told: a nebulous amalgamation of dozens of stories I've read before in the same theme that I deeply disliked.
Once I stopped underestimating Suzanne Collins and actually let her tell me her damn story, I found myself engaged and finished reading it in a couple of days.
Spoilers for the full book and its ending behind the cut as I explain further.
( Spoilers be within ) While the main trilogy was certainly quite the criticism of capitalism, I found this book much better in that sense, and there are a few reasons for that.
Firstly: the trilogy allows a much wider space to be placed between the reader and the characters. The concept is so brutal that it feels outlandish, and the allegories feel distant enough that it leaves space for things like our real world media replicating the Capitol's media with nary a blink. Not only that, but it also leaves distance for things like an international audience (including myself) not even realizing the books are set in the U.S.A. until it was made explicit by the latter movies. I don't necessarily fault Collins for that, mind; it just is what it is, and we can't really control what people will read into our story regardless of our intention or even skill.
So, I quite like how this book puts that (along with other things) sharply into focus. We do know now that this is happening in the U.S.A., but this time that feels even more grounded, I think partly because it's set in the past and brings things like the technology described to an easily recognizeable point from our real world (the movies are especially guilty of using high-tech visuals that, again, put the audience farther away from the allegories).
Speaking of other things that this book brings into focus, the second thing I wanted to mention: the POV. The original trilogy is a personal story that is set in the fight for survival under systemic oppression and the fight to bring down those same systems. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the main trilogy leaves the systemic part of capitalism unaddressed, but when we bond and sympathize with the main characters of a story, our emotional processing of the themes and the narrative will often be almost inextricable from them. We feel for Katniss, Peeta, and others, and our understanding of the rest of the world surrounds that.
We don't empathize with Snow, though. And I think that's partly why Collins gets to really explore how systems of oppression are 'established', and, more importantly, maintained, in this book. In the absence of that bond, there is room for that.
I might make another post specifically about how she does this with the cast of characters of this book, because that's an essay in itself, but I surprisingly think Sejanus might be my 'favourite' character. I don't like him but he is a key part of some of my favourite things the book addresses regarding capitalism. Sejanus (and other characters) demonstrate attempts at changing a system while being part of it, and how even 'good' people who don't want to benefit from oppression still do... and how misguided it can be to believe that how they (we) feel is in and of itself of any value to the fight or to the people being more oppressed.
When we were in Katniss' POV, our perspective of the Capitol and its people was from below. Regardless of any divisions that may or may not exist in the opressor class, from this POV all we can really see is the distance between us and them, and how much they benefit from the District's and Katniss's opression: they are all 'guilty'. And I'm not saying that's wrong, but it's also not the full picture. In Snow's POV, we get to actually see how this division of classes plays out, all the way from the top (which is much more fractured than we - Katniss and readers - may be led to believe) to the bottom (which is also fractured).
So about those fractures: Where I'm from, we name social classes from top down as A, B, C (and D), but also at times in a way that translates better to the way anglocentric spheres refer to them, high, middle, and low. This book so effectively shows the sub-divisions in all of these. Sure the middle class exists, but within it we have the lower middle class and the higher middle class. Those in the higher middle class often fully believe themselves to be in the high (A) class, and we get to see this play in the book.
Most of the Capitol would be said to be the high class, be it by themselves or by the Districts. Yet, when push comes to shove in a capitalist society, that illusion crashes down fast. The centering point of the Snows' financial woes, and how Collins sums capitalism down so well through the topic of food, displays this well. There's a specific incident that Snow witnesses during the worst of the war as people get desperate for food that is just such a direct metaphor to capitalism that it'd be crass and too heavy-handed if it was being written by another less skilled author, but Collins is too good for it to fall flat. SPOILER: it involves
( spoiler ).
But the thing is, this story is set post-war, not mid-war. And in the post-war, we see how those beliefs and illusions that had gotten brutally cracked are put right back up, explicitly by the people affected by them.The Snows are only one of the families who do so: all of the higher middle class goes back to the facade of being high class, and no one wants to be reminded of how all it takes is one push for them to go hungry too.
And I'm not even close to talking about the low middle class topic in the book, and the cops Peacemakers. Lord, the Peacemakers! Why not take the chance and criticize the U.S.A. army, why it exists, and how it even gets to exist while we're at it, eh?
All of this is inside a pretty short book set in the first-person POV of a character we know to be a villain in the larger story. Again, in the hands of a less skilled author, pretty much all of it would fall flat and dangerously counter to the story that was told in the main trilogy. But this is not in the hands of a less skilled author, and if you let Suzanne Collins tell you the story she wants to tell, not the one you think you're going to hear, I reckon you might find it interesting, too.
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