Catching Fire

I read Catching Fire in two sittings on a week when I had no business reading novels, the second half finished at about two in the morning with the lamp off and the phone face down on the table. Suzanne Collins published it in 2009, one year after The Hunger Games, and it is a rarer thing than a good sequel: it takes the victory you were handed at the end of the first book and hands you the bill for it. What follows is the whole plot, twists and the ending included. Then an argument about where the book bends.

Snow in the parlor

Katniss Everdeen comes home from a hunt to find President Snow sitting in her house, smelling of roses, drinking tea with her mother. He is clear about the last arena: the nightlock berries were read across the country as defiance, not romance. District 11 rioted after Rue's death, and an uprising has broken in District 8. So Katniss has a job: during the Victory Tour she must convince every district and the Capitol itself that her love for Peeta Mellark is real, right down to her own face when she is not performing. Snow lists what he will take if she fails: her mother and Prim, Gale who was seen kissing her, Haymitch, Peeta. He leaves a white rose on the table as a calling card.

She tells Haymitch on the train, and he gives her the flattest truth available: there is no exit. She can marry Peeta on camera, live in the Victor's Village, mentor every year and perform the love story forever, or the people she loves start disappearing. Katniss is not a natural actor and knows it, which is the engine of the whole book: she must make an audience believe something she cannot confirm to herself.

The victory tour

The tour has a fixed shape: a train, a wreath at a memorial in each town square, a prepared speech, no personal additions. The first stop is District 11, Rue's district. When Katniss finishes speaking, an old man whistles the four note signal she and Rue used in the arena, the square raises the three finger salute, and a peacekeeper shoots him on the spot. Haymitch's advice after that: keep it short, do not give them a reason to kill the next one.

Her speeches turn small and personal, and the crowds answer back with anger rather than fear. In each Justice Building Haymitch locks them in the dusty dome to talk without microphones. It is there Peeta learns about Snow's threats, and he is angrier at being kept in the dark than about the threats themselves. From then on he insists on being told everything.

The tour ends in the Capitol, where Peeta tells Caesar Flickerman on live television that he and Katniss are engaged, a plan agreed with Haymitch because a marriage would put their families beyond reach. She says yes in front of the country, then looks at Snow for her answer, and he gives an almost invisible shake of the head: not enough. At the victory ball she meets the new Head Gamemaker, Plutarch Heavensbee, who shows her his pocket watch: rub the glass and a mockingjay appears and vanishes, and his parting words are that it starts at midnight.

Back home Katniss breaks the rules and hunts past the fence, where two women from District 8 tell her they are walking to District 13, the district the Capitol claims to have destroyed.

Gale at the whipping post

Katniss and Gale have been talking about running away, and about the kiss neither of them will explain. Then Gale goes to sell a wild turkey to the old Head Peacekeeper Cray and instead finds the new man, Romulus Thread, who arrests him for poaching and has him stripped and tied to a post in the town square. Thread gives him forty lashes. Katniss arrives with Peeta, sees what is happening, and throws herself over Gale without thinking; the whip catches her across the cheek and she is on the ground before anyone can stop it. Haymitch shoves his way in and threatens the Capitol by name, and a peacekeeper named Purnia announces that the required number of lashes has been administered. They cut Gale down and carry him to Katniss's house, where her mother and Prim work through the night on a back that is raw from shoulder to waist.

The district changes around them in days. A whipping post, stocks and gallows go up in a storm, machine guns appear on the rooftops, the Hob is burned, and the mine reopens with lower pay and longer hours. Katniss decides she is done running and wants to fight, then sees the new hardware in the square and understands there is nothing to fight with yet. Haymitch tells her what everyone knows: a district hungry for bread cannot riot.

Haymitch's bargain

The Quarter Quell announcement is delivered by Snow from a sealed box of cards prepared by the first Gamemakers, which is the Capitol's way of saying the cruelty was always on the schedule. On the seventy-fifth anniversary, the tributes will be reaped from the existing pool of victors. Katniss runs from the house, hides in the cellar of an empty house in the Victor's Village, and screams into her shirt until her voice is gone. Every victory she has won has just been reclassified as a draft notice.

She goes to Haymitch, who is drunk at his kitchen table with a knife in his fist. He tells her that Peeta was there before her, begging to be allowed back in to protect her. Katniss asks for a drink instead, and the two make the deal: this time they keep Peeta alive, which means helping him kill Haymitch's friends. The pain in his face is the only honest thing in the room. The next morning Peeta pours every bottle down the drain and tells his supplier to stay bought, because there will be no drunkards on this team. Gale catches Katniss in the doorway that night and says they should have gone when she suggested it. She tells him they would have run and her family would have died, and that she now has Peeta to protect.

Reaping the victors

Reaping day is hot, with machine guns trained on the crowd and Effie Trinket in a gold wig doing her best. There is only one name in the girls' bowl, so Katniss is chosen without ceremony. Effie then draws Haymitch, and Peeta volunteers before Haymitch can move. The traditional goodbyes in the Justice Building are cancelled by Thread, who calls it a new procedure and marches them straight to a train with no cameras, no crowd, and no goodbye to Prim.

On the train they watch the recap and meet the field they will be killing: Cashmere and Gloss, Brutus volunteering again at forty, Enobaria, Finnick Odair who won at fourteen, eighty year old Mags volunteering in place of Annie, Johanna Mason who won by pretending to be weak, Wiress and Beetee, and Chaff, who is Haymitch's old friend. Haymitch watches in silence as people he has known for decades take the stage. That night Katniss and Peeta watch the tape of Haymitch's own Quarter Quell and see him win by tricking his final opponent into the arena's force field, and they learn that Katniss's mockingjay pin once belonged to Maysilee Donner, Madge's aunt.

Training and interviews

In the Capitol the other victors are colleagues, and they play games with Katniss before any Games begin. Finnick ties an elaborate knot at her shoulder and offers to trade secrets. Johanna strips naked in the elevator to prove that shame is a tool she no longer carries. Wiress and Beetee teach her the trick that matters: a force field leaves a shimmer in the air, and a knife tapped against a tree will bounce back if the field is close. Beetee calls it the chink in the armor.

Haymitch's final instruction is the one she carries into the arena: remember who the enemy is. For the Gamemakers' session, Katniss strings a rope around a dummy's neck and jerks it free to show them what their own control looks like, and Peeta paints Rue covered in flowers. In the interviews Katniss wears the heavy white wedding dress Snow ordered, altered by Cinna. She raises her arms, twirls, and the outer layer burns away into feathers on live television, leaving a mockingjay where the bride was. Peeta then tells Caesar Flickerman that they are already married and that Katniss is pregnant, and the other victors reach for each other's hands in a line the districts have not seen since the Dark Days. The next morning, as Katniss stands sealed in the glass cylinder that will lift her into the arena, three peacekeepers beat Cinna unconscious with metal studded gloves and drag him away. She goes in shaking.

The clockwork island

The arena is a circle. The tributes rise on pedestals around a golden Cornucopia on an island in the middle of a salt lake, twelve spokes of land running out to a jungle ring. The Cornucopia holds weapons only, and there is no fresh water because the lake is salt. At the gong the water fills with bodies. Katniss gets a bow, and Finnick reaches her with a gold bangle from Haymitch on his wrist, a signal that he can be trusted. Mags joins them and the three swim for the jungle.

Then the island starts keeping time. A bell tolls midnight and the first horror begins. A fog that is nerve gas slides out of one wedge, and Finnick can carry only one person, so Mags walks into it to buy them seconds. Jabberjays in another wedge scream with Prim's voice and Annie's voice until the birds are shot. It is Wiress, half mad by then, who keeps saying tick tock until Katniss works it out: the island is a clock, twelve sectors, twelve scheduled attacks, and Plutarch's watch was the warning. When she says so out loud, the Gamemakers spin the Cornucopia to scramble their bearings.

At the Cornucopia the alliance loses Wiress, whose throat is cut by Gloss. Katniss kills Gloss and Johanna buries an axe in Cashmere. Beetee then explains his plan: at midnight lightning always strikes the same tall tree in the twelve o'clock wedge, so if his conductive wire runs from that tree across the wet sand and into the salt water, the whole beach is electrified at the strike. That is the electric water of the arena, their closest thing to a weapon. Katniss and Johanna carry the coil down through the jungle, and halfway there the wire comes slack, cut from above. The coil smashes into Katniss's head, Johanna sits on her, strips the armor back from her arm and cuts deep into her forearm with a knife, then smears Katniss's face with blood and tells her to stay down. Brutus and Enobaria arrive, decide she is as good as dead, and run after Johanna. Bleeding and certain the alliance has broken, Katniss staggers uphill toward Peeta.

The dome comes down

She finds Beetee unconscious, holding Peeta's knife with wire wrapped around the hilt, and she understands what the plan really was: not to fry the beach but to drive the current into the force field itself, through the weak spot Beetee showed her in training. She ties the wire to an arrow and shoots it at the chink in the armor as the lightning hits. The dome bursts into blue light and comes apart, and a hovercraft lowers a claw with Plutarch inside, closing her eyes for Katniss.

She wakes in a hospital, pulls out her tubes, and walks down a corridor with an empty syringe, and hears Haymitch, Finnick and Plutarch talking in the next room. Haymitch explains everything: Plutarch has worked against the Capitol for years, tributes from districts 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 11 knew a version of the plan, the rolls of bread were a code for the timing, and Johanna cut into Katniss's arm to remove the tracker so the Capitol could not follow her out. Katniss and Peeta were kept ignorant so they could swear to nothing if it failed, and Peeta was kept alive because Katniss would have abandoned the alliance the moment he died. The revolution lives as long as she does, Plutarch says, because she is the mockingjay.

She goes at Haymitch with her nails and has to be sedated. When she wakes, Gale is beside the bed with his arm in a sling, and he tells her, in the voice he uses for wounded animals, that he got her mother and Prim out in time but the Capitol has firebombed District 12 into rubble. There is no District 12. Peeta, Johanna and Enobaria are captured and are now in Capitol hands. The arena is behind her, and everything else is in front.

What does not hold

The clock is the book's showpiece and its least convincing piece of scenery. Twelve wedges, twelve horrors, one bell per hour: it is an engineer's diagram more than a place, and the alliance solves it within a day and then moves around it as if following a schedule. Collins needs the puzzle to be solvable, but the neatness drains the island of accident. The first book frightened because you never knew what the forest would do next; here the forest has a timetable.

President Coin is the other structural problem. She arrives in the last few pages, fully formed, with a name, a manner and a whole underground country behind her. Everything we learn about District 13 comes in one block of exposition delivered to a drugged Katniss, so the new political order of the sequel is handed over rather than dramatized. The book has spent three hundred pages on Snow's face and about three paragraphs on the person who will matter just as much next time.

The love triangle also starts to press. Gale is largely absent from the middle of the book, kept at home to be whipped and then to deliver bad news, while Peeta is a performance Katniss cannot evaluate: she is unsure what she feels because the narrative has not yet decided. Haymitch's bargain is the sharpest relationship in the novel, a dry arrangement between two people who know they are being used, and the romance keeps getting in its way. None of this sinks it. The Victory Tour is the best political writing in the series, and the final chapter ends with a loss so complete that the next book has nowhere to retreat to.