{"id":1848,"date":"2014-08-16T23:29:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-16T23:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/2014\/08\/suzanne-collins-catching-fire-and-linda-la-plantes-wrongful-death.html\/"},"modified":"2016-10-11T19:10:36","modified_gmt":"2016-10-11T19:10:36","slug":"suzanne-collins-catching-fire-and-linda-la-plantes-wrongful-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/2014\/08\/suzanne-collins-catching-fire-and-linda-la-plantes-wrongful-death.html\/","title":{"rendered":"Suzanne Collins’ “Catching Fire” and Linda La Plante’s “Wrongful Death”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Ain’t that scary<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table>
Autrement, A Concise Reading Journal by the Judge<\/i><\/div>

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Airports terrify me. Not for the prospect of flying, rather because the only way to kill time in there is to go leafing in the bookshops, and these always seem to contain the most insulting samples of literature ever assembled in a single place. This is, I fear, an unfortunate necessity of our civilisation: whenever I have to go on a particularly long journey (eight plus hours, staying away two or three weeks), I have to take a book with me that a.) cannot possibly tire me, no matter how long I sit there reading it, and b.) that won\u2019t be over and done with in just one hour. Airport novels are engineered for just that.<\/div>

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The thing is that there are almost no novels that can meet those criteria and still be good<\/i>. I can think of George Martin\u2019s Songs of Ice and Fire<\/i> that do the job wondrously, and when I was a kid I could read Michael Crichton from dawn to past midnight. The problem with the former is the release date of his next book (see the self-fulfilling prophecy, when the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, when the seas go dry and mountains blow in the mind like leaves<\/i>), and I\u2019ve kind of grown out of the latter. So I go for whatever I can, crossing my fingers that it\u2019ll keep my mind distracted while I sit inside that box ten-thousand feet above-ground.<\/div>
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Most recent reads: Suzanne Collins\u2019 Catching Fire<\/i> and Lynda La Plante\u2019s Wrongful Death<\/i>.<\/div>

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Golly. Did I steer that car into the tree this time.<\/div>

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(For what it\u2019s worth, the journey was to Brazil \u2013 I was there for three weeks over the World Cup \u2013 and these books certainly did not live up to the rest of the trip, which admittedly is not a fair comparison as it would take one hell of a novel to beat an evening spent snogging a Brazilian girl).<\/div>

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I suppose this isn\u2019t a \u2018review\u2019 as much as an exorcism. These novels have made me so cynical and morose that I’d be recounting them to my therapist, if I had one. Yes, I could dress this up as an intelligent discussion about the \u2018airport novel phenomenon\u2019 and what it means to literature, but the idea seems to me like that of studying tarantulas \u2013 I\u2019m sure there are plenty of fascinating things to be learnt, but Christ, who the heck wants to go near those things?<\/div>

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Let\u2019s start with Catching Fire<\/i>. I picked it up because its predecessor, The Hunger Games<\/i>, actually did its job more than decently as an airport novel. It\u2019s not exactly a difficult book to explain: the set-up is old enough that you can almost hear Suzanne Collins yelling \u2018Yabba-Dabba-Doo\u2019 as she is pitching the novel. It\u2019s so old in fact that this is one of its strengths \u2013 the dystopian totalitarian future that she represents in such crude detail is positively comforting, being after all a trope that was tired in the early seventies, and the plot is just The Running Man<\/i> except that Arnold Schwarzenegger gets replaced by an angsty teenage girl (just about the most anti-Schwarzenegger type of character they could find, showing if nothing else that this plot can run pretty smoothly without giving two figs about its central character). Then from halfway onwards it\u2019s just Rambo<\/i> with something like a love interest vaguely shoe-horned into it and some references to Imperial Rome that nobody in the USA will have picked up (oh, the capital is called \u2018Panem\u2019, like panem et circenses<\/i>, that Roman thing they used to say, get it? Get it? Clever!).<\/div>

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The fun in it, from my personal point of view, lay purely in reading about these characters slugging it out in the woods. Everything else is just an excuse to set up the stage. (Does anyone actually give a fuck about Prim?)<\/div>

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(I just typed that question into Google and found out \u2013 SPOILER ALERT \u2013 that in the third book she dies<\/a>).<\/div>

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Prim and proper<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table>I was expecting pretty much the same from the second book, so I found it TOTALLY BAFFLING that, in a book of 400 pages, the author decided to wait until after page 300 (THREEHUNDRED) to actually get her characters to DO what her goddamn novel is supposed to be ABOUT, a.k.a. fighting! Instead, Collins seems adamant in her belief that we want to find out everything about Katniss\u2019s mother and her sister and the hot black-haired what\u2019s-his-name-again and the new house where they live. Or else we get to learn how Katniss goes hunting for squirrels. Or the political science behind this \u2018complex\u2019 (groan) totalitarian society. Or the baker boy\u2019s paintings (for crying out loud). Or Prim, when things get really bad.<\/div>

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And even when they FINALLY get into the arena, the Rambo narrative is totally thrown out of the window in favour of these \u2018alliance strategies\u2019 they decide to undergo, which have them walking around in a goofy party comprising the angsty teenage girl, the romantic baker who always loved her, Edward Cullen with a trident, a mumbling hag piggy-backed onto the aforementioned vampire, and two genius idiots (not making this up) who can\u2019t speak English. They don\u2019t even fight each other much \u2013 most of the time they seem too busy stabbing the monkeys on the island (???). The narrative in Catching Fire<\/i> feels less like Rambo<\/i>than it does an episode of It\u2019s a Knock-Out<\/i><\/a>.<\/div>

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I eventually lost the novel somewhere in eastern Brazil \u2013 Vitoria, or Itabuna \u2013 and I can\u2019t say I\u2019ve ever felt so indifferent about losing a book in my life. I was at around page 330 and I might have been more engaged if I\u2019d been listening to a cricket match that was being narrated by a GPS reader.<\/div>

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But I still had to confront the flight home, so I picked up one of those items that have always been completely arcane to me \u2013 a crime novel.<\/div>

<\/a><\/div>Crime, despite being one of the most popular genres in literature (and, in terms of raw economics, certainly one of the most important), is to me a mysterious whirlpool, dark and chronically holding back all of its truths. For someone with an MA in literature, I suppose it\u2019s kind of embarrassing that I can\u2019t name a single contemporary crime author (is Agatha Christie still alive? Does she count? I haven\u2019t actually read<\/i> any of her books, but look! I know her name! I know it! Cookie!).<\/div>

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But the fact is that crime fiction is DULL. Even in the theoretically more digestible medium of film, I can never bring myself to give a crap as to why Dick Jones was killed with a marble elephant tossed against his balls or how somebody ran over the granny to inherit the stuffed Komodo dragon that she beats herself on the face with whenever she has to read a crime novel. This, to me, is the greatest of mysteries and the only one I\u2019d really like to see solved \u2013 why the hell do people read crime fiction? It\u2019s not just dull, it\u2019s almost unpleasant<\/i>, this sense of reading without being told what you want to know. And why not tell you anyway? You don\u2019t feel any more satisfied once you found out it was Bob Rogers than you did before. Why not skip to the last page and just find out? (Well, because then you\u2019ve thrown \u00a38.99 into the toilet \u2013 there\u2019s your economics).<\/div>

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But I told myself. \u2018I\u2019ve read so little, surely I talk out of prejudice\u2019. These novels must at least be entertaining<\/i>. And there\u2019s nothing else in this bookshop other than \u2018How To Make More Money\u2019 by Rich Bastard (whose idea seems to be that I should spend it on his book) or graphic novels about Captain America<\/i>, which cost about $45 and would scarcely last me an hour. So I picked up the first thing I could find \u2013 Lynda La Plante\u2019s Wrongful Death<\/i>.<\/div>

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Anna Travis, detective. Not looking too bad here.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table>In retrospect, the title should have blown the whistle and rang the alarm bells. This is a serious question \u2013 can you think of anything more banal for a crime novel than titling it \u2018Wrongful Death\u2019? Every single crime story ever could have been titled like that \u2013 if the death were not \u2018wrongful\u2019, then what in the world would the novel be about? What kind of a blurb could you write for a crime novel in which the death is not \u2018wrongful\u2019? Josh Malcolm was found dead in his bed at 08:47 in the morning. The coroner initially declared his death to be by natural causes, but when detective Cypher Rage re-examines the scene two days later, he ends up agreeing that it was by natural causes. Malcolm\u2019s death didn\u2019t leave anyone terribly disturbed as he was a bit of an ordinary chap. Now his wife Brenda must make arrangements for the funeral\u2026<\/i> But to be fair the novel doesn\u2019t start out too bad, and in spite of the prose being rather dry (but I\u2019m happy to overlook this in airport novels), I found myself interested in some of the characters. As often as not the only appealing thing in crime stories, to me at least, is the intellectual cockfight of the main characters, all or most of whom compete at who\u2019s the smartest. Sherlock<\/i> took this to levels so ridiculous that they usually tumbled into self-parody, but it shows how potent the narrative trick is \u2013 and WD uses it appropriately as we are introduced to a remarkably smart American FBI agent, a Ms Jessie Dewar.<\/div>

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Together with the main detective, Anna Travis, they set off to investigate a fishy suicide.<\/div>

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And this is where the novel goes not just downhill but off the cliff altogether. The more I went into it, the less could I bring myself to care whether this guy had actually killed himself or whether he\u2019d been murdered and why. It looks like perhaps his wife, or the wife\u2019s sister, plotted to kill him \u2013 because, hmm, probably not for money as they\u2019re already rich, some family feud of some kind I suppose OH GOD WHO GIVES A F \u2013<\/div>

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The novel started losing me around page 50, but I managed to bring myself past page 200 (out of almost 500) before I was back home \u2013 and then I put WD on the desk and haven\u2019t touched it since. I doubt if I ever will. I doubt, too, if I\u2019ll ever read another crime novel, but that\u2019s going to depend on whether my next substantial holiday is going to take place before or after George RR Martins releases his next book. The fact that both these things are set in a future more distant than Star Wars<\/i>is a somewhat depressing prospect.<\/div>

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