Suzanne Collins' “Hunger Games” has recently been the focus of articles on violence in children's books. The book is about a young girl selected to compete in a reality show. The winner gets to live. As in the most frightening dystopias, the story is set in the near future, in North America. The population has been decimated. The few who remain scrounge for food, and once a year the authorities select 24 young people, two from each of the twelve districts, to fight each other to the death. The novel is highly readable. For those who feel books should let children be children, I would say, Yes, but.
It is patronising to imagine that children cannot face violence on the page when we know what they face in life. Childhood is not idyllic for all children. Some are abducted, or sold by their parents to work on tobacco farms and in factories, fight in armies, and worse. Collins brilliantly ties it all to today's television reality shows, where respectable adults visit psychological and emotional violence on children while everyone applauds, and a classic is born.
What is it that makes violence tolerable in any book? The writer's purpose, as most readers would agree, and the writer's skill. As long as it's a work of art we permit gore, because good art provokes thought, and thinking is a reader's first duty.
Anthony Burgess in “A Clockwork Orange”, which we read in school, added a strange and powerful language to that mix. Alex, a young thug living in a British police state in the near future, tells his story in nadsat, a horrorshow teen dialect that is itself a slap in the face. He and his droogs go on a spree of knifing, looting, assault and rape, all business as usual. But at the end of the night Alex insults his chums, and that arrogance, unconscionable to his fellow hoodlums, sets him up for a downfall the very next night. They let him fall into the arms of the rozzes.
In jail, Alex is beaten, kills a fellow prisoner, and is eventually recruited for an appalling psychological experiment designed to cure him of his criminality. He is drugged and sensitised to become weak and nauseous in the face of any kind of violence, in fact or on film. Then, snivelling and defenceless, he is released. He has lost his free will, and that makes him the ideal poster boy for civil rights activists, who exploit him further.
The violence is extreme, whether Alex is dishing it out or taking it on the chin. There is, in fact, a symmetry of brutality between the criminal and the State.
“A Clockwork Orange” is also quite a funny book. Alex's self-serving theatrics, the cant of the prison wardens and their scientists, and the activists' hypocrisies are all hilarious. Burgess's satire ends happily for Alex. Our hero is restored to his “senses” and free to rampage again. We laugh, uneasily, and then we begin to think.
anantharaman.bookwise@gmail.com
