The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes
“Well, as they said, it's not over until the mockingjay sings.”
It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capital, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute.
The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined -- every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute... and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.
I think this book will alienate quite a few of Hunger Games fans. You see, it was easy to root for Katniss pitted against the ridiculous brutality of her world. She spoke to you, the girl who volunteered, the girl who defied her own self-preservation instinct to stand up for what’s right. But The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes makes it impossible to root for its protagonist because he is the ultimate antagonist, because we know what he will become.
You don’t root for young Hitler to find love and success, after all.
Coriolanus Snow cannot be redeemed. But he can be understood, to a point, and that’s what Collins did well here (or so my sleep-deprived brain after late night bleary-eyed reading believes).
I like that Snow is not a born sociopath. He is bright but unlikeable, ambitious, resentful, conceited and very entitled, with capacity for manipulation and ruthlessness. He is slippery like snakes. But he has some humanity in him - capacity for friendship, capacity for love, capacity to care and even a degree of sacrifice.
The problem is the choices that he decides to make - the choices fueled by his over-developed self-preservation instinct which is by definition selfish. The problem is that you don’t need to be a born stone-cold tyrant — you can choose to become one when you choose yourself above all, when you make the corrupt system work for you instead of choosing to fight it. He chooses complicity — and that’s what shapes him into what he will become by the time 64 years later when Katniss Everdeen volunteers to become District 12 tribute in the horrific televised spectacle of Hunger Games.
This is a story of the formation of a tyrant - but the one who understands what makes others rebel, and that, as we know, makes him even more dangerous. No surprise he is behind the whole concept of Hunger Games as a mandatory sickening voyeristic pageantry spectacle.
It’s not a love story, despite the superficial resemblance to it. Snow wants Lucy, wants to possess her, wants her to be his — and wants it only as far as it suits his comfort. Don’t think that it ends up being a desperate turn to villainy after the loss of a loved one — that would be too cheap.
No, there is no redemption for Coriolanus Snow. There is only understanding which at least for me led to even more repulsion. Because he saw a path that Katniss eventually took — and instead forged his own, the easier one, the one of cruel overcompensation for almost not taking it.
