Book Review - The Hunger Games trilogy

The Hunger Games

Catching Fire

Mockingjay

by Suzanne Collins


Sometimes when you're laid low by sickness, you don't feel like reading anything too weighty. A perfect time, I thought, to get into this series of teen-fiction books, which my wife loved, and which she wanted me to read to see if I thought they were suitable for my ten-year-old son.

Well, I'm still not sure if they are suitable for a reader his age, but, given that I got through the three books in about 24 hours, I can certainly say they are a rollicking read, and that they are not just pap for empty-headed teens.

The story centres around a young girl (Katniss), who is selected to be a tribute in an annual games to the death that is fought in a future USA that has been ravaged by war and famine. The games are held so that the districts are forever kept under the heel of the Capitol. Collins deftly introduces the reader to the miserable conditions the residents of the districts have to put up with, versus the decadence of the Capitol, and quickly sets up a love triangle that our heroine has to negotiate throughout the whole trilogy. Katniss, after she wins the Games, becomes a focus for a growing rebellion against the Capitol.

As well as the excitement of the Games themselves, and the rebellion, which Collins handles expertly, there are larger questions at play in this series - questions of power and who wields it, the nature of the justness of war and violence, as well as growing up and facing life's pressures.

The all-pervading nature of media is a part of this work as well - how easy it is to get sucked into being watched by everybody, how much of what we see is real, and how do you influence people once they stop listening to you. One of the things that I found most chilling about the perception of media in the trilogy was that no-one questioned the compromises they had to make to achieve what they wanted through it.

What makes this trilogy superior to a lot of sci-fi or fantasy for kids is that while the sci-fi parts were clever, they never detracted from the story. And what a story it is. I literally couldn't put it down.

Recommended.


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book/Film Review - The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, and Peter Jackson

The Hobbit or there and back again by J.R.R. Tolkien

(many editions extant)

The third instalment of Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy has just been released, and though I haven't yet seen it, the stories I've heard of it, and my view of the first two films, have led me to revisit the book.
All of Jackson's Tolkien films have focused more on the swordplay than the singing, and while they are fine films in themselves, they are not a complete version of Tolkien’s vision. Whole sections of the Lord of the Rings were missing from the film version – Tom Bombadil anyone?

 After seeing the first two instalments of the Hobbit, and remembering my reading of the book decades ago, I felt that Jackson had wilfully mangled the story to create his Hollywood Blockbuster. He has, but not in the way I had thought. While Jackson has merged and muddled some of the action in the Hobbit, his major mangling of the story concerns its focus. The Hobbit films has become a story about Thorin Oakenshield rather than Bilbo Baggins. In the book Bilbo quickly gains the respect of the Dwarves, and in many ways becomes the leader of the expedition, with Thorin only showing glimpses of the heroism he shows in the movie (The whole Azog storyline from the film, which sets Thorin up as the King, is invented by Jackson).

 The mood of the book is ignored by the film: the book was of course initially written for children, but the “little England” feel to the writing and the gentle nature of much of the action is totally lost in the film version.

 Jackson has also been very conscious of setting up these Hobbit films as precursors to the Ring Trilogy – while Bilbo does discover the ring in The Hobbit, Tolkien does little to set up his future book (in fact I think he hadn’t yet considered publishing more about Middle Earth when the Hobbit was written). So Jackson expands on the brief mentions of the Necromancer and Radagast in the novel to help set up the rise of Sauron for The Lord of the Rings.

 Tolkien is not by any stretch of the imagination a great writer – he certainly has imagined a magnificent world, but his writing can be stilted and shallow – at times the reader can see what Tolkien wants to express, but his writing can be clumsy. The film fares better in this regard as there is no need to describe scenery or action, although Jackson has inserted some Hollywood schmaltz, mostly in Gandalf’s lines (viz “true courage is about knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one.” et. al.). If you’ve done a binge-watch of the movies, it’s worth heading back to the book, as I did, to find a more relaxed, less supercharged version of Middle-Earth.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Wind in the willows by Kenneth Grahame

London : Mammoth, 1993.                        ISBN 0749714131

(Many editions extant)

Many of us are collectors, and those of us who are bibliophiles are usually more inclined to be bitten by the collecting bug than not. Thankfully (or not!), my bibliophilic wife has different taste to me, and her book collecting runs to art, gardening, cookery, and children's classics. One book in particular that she loves is the one under review, and if it wasn't for her I would never have realized how many different iterations of it there have been. She recently brought home the edition listed at the head of this review, and it caught my eye as it had E.H. Shepard's wonderful illustrations included in colour. When I read this book in my childhood the edition I had contained these illustrations in black-and-white, so naturally I picked up the book and ended up reading it again.

And what a joy it was to do so! Memories fade over time, not helped in this books case owing to watching some fine filmed versions of the story over the years, so while some parts were familiar, others only activated very dim memories. As is usually the case, the films don't do the book justice - Ratty, Mole and Badger are curmugeonly figures, set in their ways, and Toad is wonderfully raffish. In fact the book reads in two parts - the familiar quartet of Rat, Toad, Badger and Mole, living like Edwardian gentlemen, and then the sub-plots involving Otter and his boy, and the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, a dream-like (opium-fuelled?) riff on fauns, satyrs and Pan.

This is less of a children's book than first appears, working on several levels, both as a morality tale and even somewhat of a social commentary. Although the book has lasted as a children's classic for 100 years, I do wonder if it will stay relevant for another 100 - the life that was lived then, on the river and in great houses, is becoming a dimmer memory, and to younger souls today is as distant as the Middle Ages.

Evocative of it's time, and evocative of childhood for many, perhaps I'm being too pessimistic about this books future - at least I know that I'll always have a copy (or two dozen!) on hand.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell