Hunger Games prequel falls short

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Suzanne Collins Scholastic

Most novelists who open their book with a quotation stick to just the one. Suzanne Collins dreams bigger. The prefatory page to The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes reads like the syllabus to an undergraduate philosophy course: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mary Shelley and Wordsworth all appear.

It is not the most promising opening for the much-anticipated prequel to The Hunger Games, Collins’s bestselling young adult trilogy about a dystopian America (Panem) in which children are made to fight to the death in the annual Hunger Games, a nightmarish reality TV format dreamt up by an autocratic city (the Capitol) to control the impoverished provinces (the Districts).

The title page is the first warning sign that this spinoff may not live up to readers’ appetites.

The best thing about the Hunger Games trilogy is its teenage heroine, Katniss Everdeen. Brave, resourceful and dry, her internal monologue provides a humane counterpoint to the darkness of the plots. But in her choice of protagonist for the new book, Coriolanus Snow — who fans will remember as the character who later becomes Panem’s psychopathic president — Collins has set herself a much trickier task. We are against him from the start.

The book begins 64 years before the first instalment of the trilogy, just after the Districts’ failed rebellion against the Capitol, for which the Hunger Games will become the punishment. Coriolanus is from a highborn Capitol family, but has fallen on postwar hard times. When the chance to become a “mentor” to one of the competitors at the 10th Hunger Games comes his way, he does not hesitate.

The story that follows is engaging: the formula of the Games themselves provides an engine for detail, plot twist and peril. But Coriolanus and his mentee, Lucy Gray, are both pale imitations of Katniss, and the premise on which Collins builds their close bond — mutual investment in her victory in the Games — is laughable.