Lisbeth vs. Katniss

I began reading Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy about a year ago, and got through the last book sometime during the winter. In one sense, it became a journey of personal discovery: I realized I tend to subconsciously skip over names I can't pronounce, which meant that, since the series is set in Sweden, I had lost track of at least half the characters by the time I got a few pages into the second book. Given its best-selling status in the U.S. as well as world-wide, I am now much more cheerful about my countrymen's ability to concentrate on difficult details.

While the overall plot of the Millenium trilogy is interesting, Larsson, like John Grisham, tends to focus on unimportant details which serve only to fatten the page count. Seriously, I don't need to know what kind of sandwich the characters were eating when they met in a café. By the end, I was glad to know Larsson (being dead) wouldn't be writing any more books I'd feel obliged to read.

Not so with The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins' dystopian trilogy written for teenagers. (The publisher is Scholastic, which is not the first imprint to which I look for dystopia; but then, I am a worn-out curmudgeon.) In the Millenium trilogy, you get literally hundreds of pages of people talking or looking at computers before 10-20 pages of action. The Hunger Games are extremely plot-driven, and hence are much more difficult to put down. As the series progresses, the narrative takes on a fever-dream quality reflective of the mental and emotional disintegration of its main character and narrator, Katniss Everdeen. I appreciated this not only stylistically but artistically. In this post-apocalyptic future, adolescents are forced to fight each other to the death. Instead of making the survivors cold-blooded killers, Collins chooses instead to portray them as damaged goods, a much more likely scenario.

Interestingly, The Hunger Games is much more successful as a feminist work than is the Millenium trilogy; interestingly because the latter has an explicitly feminist agenda. (SPOILER ALERT: crucial plot points will now be revealed.) The sections of the first and third books of the Millenium trilogy are headed by epitaphs of a feminist bent: in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, statistics on domestic violence; in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, a history of female warriors. One of Larsson's main characters is the much-ballyhooed punk hacker Lisbeth Salander, who in the first book falls for the other main character, idealistic journalist and stud Mikael Blomkvist, but by the end is embittered against him when she realizes he is still romantically entangled with another woman. Throughout the trilogy, Blomkvist tells woman after woman that he is happy to have sex with her, but will not commit to any one of them. At the end of the third novel, Lisbeth chooses to let Blomkvist back into her life. Although there's no commitment to a sexual relationship, implicit or otherwise, she does clearly accept him on his own terms: that is, as a philanderer. A feminism which endorses the worst forms of chauvinistic behavior is not much of a feminism at all.

The Hunger Games likewise ends on a crucial decision for its main character. Here, however, Katniss, having been exploited by two competing power bases, chooses to assasinate the president of the newly victorious rebel coalition. In one stroke, she rejects her own history of exploitation and frees (what once was) North America from a pattern of political and military oppression. Her move is a classic example of feminist empowerment, over against Lisbeth's implicit acceptance of male sexual dominance.

In the epic match-up of Lisbeth vs. Katniss, I know which I will encourage my daughters to read.