When the Kids Aren’t Alright… YA, Dystopia and Rebellion

[wingsmith]

Originally published at Tom Pollock. Please leave any comments there.

(warn­ing, con­tains mild spoil­ers for both Chaos Walk­ing, and The Hunger Games.)

Soci­ety is pinned to the dirt by a jack­boot, and only our teenagers can save us.




At least, that the story told by much of the hottest YA fic­tion out there right now. Dystopia is on a tear, whether it’s polit­i­cal repres­sion (Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games), post-apocalypse (Garth Nix’s Shade’s Chil­dren) or someone’s crazy idea of par­adise, (Cather­ine Fisher’s Icarceron). But what is it about this sub-genre that really makes it sing?

The answer? Injus­tice. The three lit­tle words that are the most impor­tant in any YA novel are ‘That’s Not Fair.’ Noone has a bet­ter devel­oped sense of (un)fairness than a teenager.

Do you remem­ber your par­ents telling you ‘life isn’t fair’, by way of order­ing you to shut up and get on with it? Do you remem­ber how mad­den­ing it was? I do. YA dystopia takes this lit­tle cant of accep­tance to the harsh­ness of life, and twists it into a ral­ly­ing cry.

‘Life isn’t fair? Screw that. Let’s make it fair.’



In The Hunger Games, 16-year old Kat­niss Everdeen becomes the liv­ing embod­i­ment of this cry: the Mock­ing­jay, the sym­bol of resis­tance and rebel­lion. THG has been phe­nom­e­nally suc­cess­ful, and I think that this, more than the blood-soaked glad­i­a­to­r­ial com­bat, the pretty dresses or the love-triangle, explains why. Mil­lions of us have taken Kat­niss to our hearts so fast because, in a sense was already there, in our urge to rail against the unfair­ness in being sub­ject to another’s control.

But THG is at the fore­front of a skein of YA lit­er­a­ture that does more than pan­der to our desire to rebel. It cuts that desire open, and sticks it under the microscope.

Nowhere is this bet­ter illus­trated than in Patrick Ness’s fab­u­lous Chaos Walk­ing tril­ogy. At the start of vol­ume one, The Knife of Never Let­ting Go, the lead char­ac­ter Todd Hewitt is an inno­cent. He’s been lied to to keep him that way, and when he learns the night­mar­ish secret at the heart of his small town, he runs. This first story is about real­iza­tion and flight. It’s a fight for sur­vival, rather than victory.

By the third install­ment. Mon­sters of Men. Todd has stopped run­ning. He ought to be ready to fight injus­tice, to van­quish the Mayor (the main oppres­sor) and set the world to rights. And he would be too, if the events of the sec­ond book hadn’t desta­bi­lized the whole idea of resis­tance.

In The Ask and the Answer, Ness intro­duces a vio­lent insur­gency to fight the Mayor’s reign of ter­ror, an insur­gency that uses sui­cide bombs and IEDs and causes mas­sive col­lat­eral casu­al­ties. Viola, the series’s sec­ond main pro­tag­o­nist, becomes a mem­ber of this insur­gency, and a tool of its leader: a woman no less ruth­less and manip­u­la­tive than the Mayor. Collins too, gives us a flawed and bru­tal resis­tance in The Hunger Games. Mockingjay’s rebels degrade, tor­ture, mass-murder and may even be unwit­tingly work­ing to hand power to yet another dic­ta­to­r­ial regime.




But where I think Ness’s series stands out, is in the way it treats Todd in The Ask and The Answer. The repres­sive regime co-opts him, and he becomes an offi­cer in its secret police. Kat­niss too is co-opted in THG,  forced to fight in the blood­bath that is the tit­u­lar games, but her com­pli­ance is always forced, never will­ing. Todd’s cor­ro­sion is more sub­tle. The Mayor steps into a fatherly role, praises him and cru­cially, empha­sises his dif­fer­ence from those that he tortures.

I think be my favourite aspect of Chaos Walk­ing -the most con­vinc­ing and insight­ful piece of dystopia build­ing -is the Mayor’s con­stant twist­ing of dif­fer­ence into threat. It’s always the Mayor who tries to cast the bat­tle between his inquisi­to­r­ial ‘Ask’ and the insur­gent ‘Answer’ as a war between gen­ders. At one point, he jus­ti­fies ever more bru­tal hor­rors against those women left under his con­trol by saying.

‘Even if they aren’t actu­ally mem­bers of the Answer, they’re women and their sym­pa­thies will nat­u­rally lie with whose who are like them’.

Note, he doesn’t say that women are bad, trea­so­nous or any more nat­u­rally inclined to blow up churches than men are. His claim is sim­ply this: They are women, you are a man. The con­flict is tribal, and they are the wrong tribe. It might not be rea­son enough to hate them, but it’s rea­son enough to hurt them.

It’s a hor­rif­i­cally plau­si­ble argu­ment, and one that lies at the mouth of a metaphor­i­cal great black pit. Its not a pit that ever claims Todd fully, his love for a woman - Viola - saves him from it. But Todd does com­mit atroc­i­ties, and unlike Kat­niss, he does take an inno­cent life. It’s a brave deci­sion by Ness, and one that’s used to pro­mote a more hope­ful mes­sage: no mat­ter how far you fall, no mat­ter how bad it gets, you can always choose to find a way back.

Dystopia fits YA fist to glove and it seems to me, the treat­ment is get­ting more sophis­ti­cated, urgent and nec­ces­sary. Courage, the supreme virtue in sto­ries like Harry Pot­ter, is insuf­fi­cient. It’s not enough to be brave enough to fight, you need to be smart enough to to know who to fight for. And, cru­cially, both brave and smart enough to know when to stop.

If there’s one theme both of these won­der­ful series ham­mer home, it’s famil­iar but still vital one, that vio­lence begets vio­lence, and that a time will come whenyou have to have the guts not to throw the next punch.