Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

 

Prequels are a popular genre, especially in Hollywood. They build on an established IP and bring the coveted "brand recognition" and thus a guaranteed audience. Nevertheless, especially critics view these products with great reservations: all too often, they are unable to contribute anything relevant to the original story and suffer under the burden of the original narrative. How exciting can it really be to follow the origin story of the antagonist of the "Hunger Games" series, President Snow? The answer to the question "Why did the antagonist turn evil?" has driven countless more or less successful projects by now but all too often leads to excessively banal results. Did Darth Vader really become a more interesting character since we know he feared the death of his beloved? The subdued reactions to J.K. Rowling's origin story of Dumbledore also speak volumes. Accordingly, I was skeptical about Collins' new work, which - almost immediately with a film deal - sets out to explain why the villain of the series turned evil.

It is the year of the tenth Hunger Games, 64 years before the events of the "Hunger Games" novel series that made Suzanne Collins famous and was filmed with Jennifer Lawrence in the lead role. The wounds of the "dark days" and the murderous war between the districts and the Capitol are still fresh. In response to the rebellion, the Capitol has decreed that every year, two teenagers from each district must fight to the death against each other, as a ritual reminder of the dark days and a guarantee that the districts will not start a rebellion again. But the "Hunger Games" are in crisis: the ratings are steadily declining, and after ten years, more and more questions arise as to whether individuals who were between two and eight years old at the time of the rebellion should really be sent to their deaths for the sins of their parents. It is in this dynamic that head gamemaker Volumnia Gaul introduces a radical innovation: the graduating class of the academy should serve as mentors for the tributes and ensure that they put on a spectacle instead of simply slaughtering each other within minutes as before.

One of these graduates is Coriolanus Snow. Snow comes from a venerable family of the Capitol, but they lost their fortune in the war. The death of his father left Coriolanus and his cousin Tigris as orphans. The only chance to maintain their position in society, Coriolanus sees in the Plynth Prize, an award for the top graduate - now linked to the success of the Hunger Games due to Gaul's new idea. Unfortunately, Snow has the bitter enmity of the headmaster, Casca Highbottom, who is determined to see him fail. Therefore, Coriolanus is assigned the girl from District 12 as a tribute - traditionally one of the tributes with the worst chances. But this year is different: due to an intrigue in the district, the Covey (a kind of Roma community) chose Lucie Gray Baird, whose talent for performances seems to offer a chance to shine.

As Snow tries to prepare his tribute in the experimental environment of the games, an increasingly intimate relationship develops between the two. Soon, Coriolanus is openly violating the rules of the games to save Lucy Gray's life. At the same time, he develops a closer relationship with his unpopular classmate Sejanus Plynth, whose father, as a war profiteer, made the ascent from District 2 to the Capitol - where he constantly struggles with the snobbery of the elite and his own feelings of guilt. Sejanus is the only one openly protesting against the inhumane games and criticizing the Capitol and its contempt for humanity.

When Lucy Gray unexpectedly wins the games, Coriolanus is forcibly conscripted as a peacekeeper. He requests a transfer to District 12, hoping to meet Lucy Gray again there. Sejanus has also volunteered as a peacekeeper to escape the social pressure of the Capitol. In his naivety, he gets involved with the resistance movement in District 12 and threatens to drag Coriolanus and Lucy Gray into ruin. Coriolanus betrays his "friend", who is promptly executed, but a murder of the mayor's daughter, who threatened to expose his involvement, forces him to flee with Lucy Gray: if the murder weapons were found, DNA analysis would leave him no chance. When he accidentally stumbles upon the weapons with Lucy Gray, he is presented with the opportunity to return and rise as an officer of the peacekeepers. But Lucy Gray is the only loose end in this equation...

Coriolanus Snow begins the story in a state that might be rather unexpected: he is the sympathetic character and protagonist of the story. Collins succeeds in this feat for two central reasons. One is a clever structural decision: Snow is an underdog. The poverty of the family and the struggle against social decline provide an understandable and empathy-promoting framework. After all, who wouldn't want to see him triumph over his blasé and affected classmates? His relationship with grandmother and cousin is good, he does not possess any obviously malicious character traits. That's one point.

The other is Collins' undeniable greatest ability as a writer, her talent for personal narrative structures. The "Hunger Games" books work primarily because of the relentless focus on the main character Katniss Everdeen, whose first-person perspective is the only one Collins grants the readers. But since Katniss is a deeply flawed person (she is unempathetic and has no sense of the politics around her), the readers are constantly misled by her and are emotionally close to her; because she (again: clever structure) experiences everything anew as a stranger in the Capitol and in the games, we as readers share the same experiences as her.

Collins employs this trick again in her prequel. She dispenses with the first-person perspective, but Coriolanus remains our only reference point. The personal narrative perspective refrains from any judgment, which makes it necessary for us to develop our own relationship with Snow. Unlike Katniss, he lacks neither self-confidence nor ambition; he constructs his own story, even in front of himself - and thus in front of the readers. This makes the reading incredibly attractive and enriching.

The protagonist's downfall is therefore rather subtle than with a thunderous bang like the infamous "Nooooo!" of Darth Vader. Coriolanus is not a good person from the beginning. While he is filled with sincere love for his grandmother and cousin, he has no empathy for the poorer residents of the Capitol, let alone the residents of the districts. He feels almost nothing for his own class. His world consists of himself and his aspirations, to which everything must submit. While his family does exactly that - Tigris and his grandmother sacrifice everything for the boy's success - he appreciates it fundamentally, but also perceives it as a natural state. The "injustice" that the Snows were displaced from their top position burns in him like a fire.

But since we only perceive his perspective, it is temptingly easy to share this view. Casca Highbottom, one of the sharpest critics of the Hunger Games, becomes an effortlessly wicked antagonist - because he knows exactly who he is dealing with. By the end of the story, Highbottom's fears are fatally confirmed - not that it would help anyone anymore. Yet there is an alternative for Coriolanus. His love for Lucy Gray is certainly sincere (although it takes him a long time to admit it), and when he is stationed in District 12, he sacrifices everything for her without hesitation. It is thanks to Collins' grand narrative that the downfall is more of an unconscious descent: as long as Coriolanus has no choice - and his analytical abilities and undoubtedly existing self-control and tactical understanding make this clear to him - he does the right thing. He saves Sejanus from the arena by empathetically pushing the right buttons; he leads Lucy Gray to victory by making clever decisions; he gains her trust through human affection; and so on. But as soon as he has the choice between happiness with Lucy Gray and the long-awaited access to power and status, everything collapses immediately; with minimal hesitation, he opts for access to power and status.

Lucy Gray is the first to notice this - and takes flight. Of course, Coriolanus blames her, without ever admitting to himself what Lucy Gray noticed in just one empathetic moment: that he is a master of self-justification. When she almost playfully remarks that she is the last loose end, Coriolanus protests in what is probably sincere indignation - an honesty he feels real in that moment and that is only a pale memory minutes later, a thin shell of normal human emotion that he has played so convincingly for years that he believed it himself.

At the end of the story, this house of lies has collapsed, but Coriolanus Snow emerges from it only strengthened. With Volumnia Gaul's protective hand over him and the Plynth legacy as a financial cushion, there is no need to pretend anything anymore. The sacrifice of his "friend" Sejanus brought him both without depriving him of sleep. Friendship is anyway a concept from which he mentally always distanced himself; he never allowed himself to fully feel friendship or love for Lucy Gray. Putting his own person behind the needs of another is completely unthinkable for Snow.

It is Volumnia Gaul who, like the Emperor in Darth Vader's development, hovers above everything, although this happens in Collins' narrative more subtly. She encourages Snow to reflect on the question of what the Hunger Games are good for, on the nature of humanity. The psychopathic gamemaker proves to be a formative influence, laying the ideological foundation for Coriolanus' entire worldview, which fits into his personality like the icing on the cake: civilization, human relationships, consideration, solidarity, all these values are only a thin veneer that tears under the slightest pressure and reveals a wild beast. It is a vulgar version of Hobbes' view of humanity, which requires the Leviathan of the Capitol, which ensures order with an iron hand because the alternative would be even worse. Permanent war cannot be avoided; therefore, the districts must be kept in permanent poverty, and the Hunger Games must be held to weaken them permanently.

Collins never makes the mistake of directly condemning this view. Rather, it is the subtle fact that an obviously malicious person like Gaul and the later antagonist of the "Hunger Games" series hold these positions - apart from the hopefully functioning moral compass of the readers - that leads them onto the wrong track. That criticism remains unarticulated because Sejanus, on the one hand, represents his morally correct position with thoughtless naivety, and Highbottom, on the other hand, cannot question the supremacy of the Capitol and above all suffers from his personal guilt, makes it easy for us to follow the formulated variant. Collins thus manages to make the readers complicit, to lead them through Snow's radicalization process and to leave them at the end with the queasy feeling in the pit of their stomachs that they just cheered for the creation of the "modern" Hunger Games. One understands the train of thought, the mentality of the perpetrators of this system - no easy task, but Collins masters it with aplomb.

In addition to this core of relevant ideas that give the story significance and depth, Collins also avoids many pitfalls of such prequels. Lucy Gray is not a Katniss 2.0. That she also comes from District 12 is rather a deception maneuver of the author to play with the audience's expectations. The same applies to the Hunger Games themselves: their genesis and form are organically integrated into the plot and at the same time made believable in a way that elegantly eliminates all the gaps in the world-building that I lamented in my original plot critique from 2012. Just like her other novels, the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is highly recommended.