almost safe: pain, comfort and compromise in sunrise on the reaping

sweets, icing sugar, torture, reconstructions and halfway comforts that turn into nothing

This post will contain spoilers for all of Sunrise on the Reaping. Thank you so much to my paid subscribers who make everything I write here possible. That’s doubly true for big translation and commentary projects like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which take a lot of work and will all be posted for free. If you’d like to read more of my writing and support my work, you can become a paid subscriber for £4 per month and get an extra essay per week. Coming up soon we have medievalism in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and a further Hunger Games essay on dramatic irony, memory and medieval fourfold reading of scripture in Sunrise on the Reaping. If you would like to support me but aren’t able to become a regular paid subscriber, I also have a ko-fi tip jar here.

This post will contain spoilers for all of Sunrise on the Reaping.

Sunrise on the Reaping plays an interesting role in the Hunger Games canon and continuity, as well as in literature more broadly. It’s strange to be both a prequel and a sequel, fulfilling prophecies at the same time as creating them. Suzanne Collins had a difficult job writing this book and when it was first announced, I wondered how she could possibly pull it off and make it good - a book that has a satisfying plot in its own right at the same time as staring forty years backwards to Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and twenty five years forwards to the main trilogy. I had a lot of faith in her but I was baffled about what could satisfy everything on that to do list. It’s like inserting an extar book between the Old Testament and New Testament - how can we add something that satisfies in both directions as well as existing worthily on its own?

That forward-looking-backward-looking structure has profound implications for Haymitch’s story and how we all read it. The story is drenched in dramatic irony - really, really, really sad dramatic irony. Readers all over the world, with and without any training in literary criticism, are reading like medieval theological scholars doing fourfold readings of the bible. Analogies, symbols and prophecies are exploding in every direction and readers are catching at all the bits of significance.

A book release like this (I love the book, btw) is a perfect example of the times I most love being on the internet. I love watching a fandom hivemind digest new text and it’s a rare joy to see it in a book that reaches so far in so many directions within and outside its own canon.

I already knew when I downloaded the ebook the morning it was released that I was going to be most interested in how Haymitch’s story occupies that ‘middle’ place between Lucy Gray and Katniss. We all know from the first page of his story that he can only ever be a start to a revolution, not finish it. Every sentence of the novel gets inflected by the idea that Hyamitch can’t be allowed to be anything other than a sad alcoholic for twenty five years. We’re always already sad when he talks about his plans and the things he loves.

The thing that fascinates and upsets me most about it all, though, is how constantly Haymitch tries to compromise with the universe. So many sentences in his narration are structured as ‘if I can give up this/get there/manage this one thing perfectly, then I can deserve half of what I originally wanted’. This halfway book is full of half comforts and half plans. Haymitch is trapped in an eternal bargaining phase. You bargain and bargain and hope you can keep half of what you wanted, but it all ends up completely ruined. If I can make sure Ampert doesn’t suffer, it can be okay that he has to die. If I can let go of Lenore Dove and just see her one more time, she’ll get to be okay. Haymitch is trapped in the middle of a story he doesn’t get to determine the beginning or the end of. All the time he is trying to bargain with the universe, we know how it ends.

The arena sets a lot of this up for us, the arena we already know Haymitch is going to end up in from the original trilogy. Everything in the arena has half the traits you’d expect from the lovely and safe version of it. The water is shimmering, ‘crystal-clear’ and abundant, but it isn’t drinkable. Having some of the qualities of good water but lacking one important one means we end up with something that’s wholly awful. It appears to be halfway satisfactory, but halfway gets us nothing. Haymitch exists at the halfway point of the series, partway between Lucy Gray and Katniss, partway between the idea of a revolution and the revolution that worked. He ends up living a partway bargaining tragedy.

Some of the most evocative physical descriptions in Sunrise in the Reaping are descriptions of pretty, colourful, comforting things. Most of them are presented to attempt to be comforting, but they’re halfway comforting at best. The incident that illustrates this most clearly is the birthday cake offered to Haymitch on the train.

We don’t do birthday cakes in my house. Seems wrong on reaping day, and Ma thinks it’s unfair for her and Sid to have a cake if I don’t. Instead, she makes something nice for breakfast, like the corn bread and sauce, and saves all of her cake energy for New Year’s Day.

She starts setting things aside months in advance: the dried apples, the sorghum syrup, the white flour. The spices – ginger and cinnamon and whatnot – are so costly she buys them in little twists of paper from the Marches’ apothecary. A couple days before New Year’s, she makes the apple filling and bakes the six layers of cake, and alternates them – cake, filling, cake, filling, until it’s in one big beautiful stack. She wraps it all up in a towel so it can rest, and then that sweet apple filling soaks into the cake. Then, on New Year’s Day at suppertime, she pours everybody a big glass of buttermilk and we eat all the stack cake that we can hold.

So the cake in front of me, with its fancy frosted flowers, is all wrong. The candles smack of the Capitol. And the song Tibby leads the Peacekeepers in, while common in 12, is never sung in my house because it would be as unsuitable as a birthday cake.¹

This passage has everything in the book that fascinates me the most. We have long, detailed description of something that can and should be comforting and pleasurable. Describing the attention and love his ma puts into her new year’s cakes is perhaps the longest and most detailed description of something good and comforting in the book. The cake is comforting physically and emotionally. It demonstrates his mother’s intense, thoughtful love for her family, love that plans and protects over time, acknowledges the worst parts of the world and works around them, treats her children equally and attentively. This cake shares some of its qualities, its ingredients, the district twelve birthday song, but being a halfway recreation makes it uncanny rather than comforting. The halfway correctness of the cake only highlights everything that’s wrong with it. It’s comforting in some physical ways but hollow in the ways that count. So the whole thing is a bust.

Sweets and cakes are all over Sunrise on the Reaping. Haymitch’s relationship with Lenore is framed by gumdrops, multicoloured or pure red, which look at each other heartbreakingly from the beginning and end of the story. The red sweets are a recreation of the physical form of the multicoloured sweets, and they taste the same, but they no longer signify love and the idea that everything will be okay. Maysilee comes from a sweetshop. Haymitch calls Sid his ‘sweet little brother’. Louella is Haymitch’s ‘sweetheart’. There is such a thing as good, meaningful, loving sweetness.

But our first sight of the Capitol in this book is ‘a street lined with candy-colored apartment buildings’. The capitol creates uncanny versions of sweet things. Drusilla is a ‘peppermint-stick nightmare’. Plutarch introduces the idea of the arena to Haymitch through the medium of sweetness and halfway, uncanny recreations.

“Come look at this.” Plutarch waves me over to a plant that hangs from a beam in a basket near the swan phone. From the long, shiny green leaves dangle pinkish pods, each equipped with what looks like a little lid. A small pool of liquid has collected at the bottom of each pod. As I inhale the sweet, faintly rotten smell, Plutarch points to one. “They put out a nectar. Insects adore it. But the surface is slippery, and they fall into the pod and can’t get out. They drown and are consumed by the plant.”

The arena is smothered in food imagery. Perhaps the defining thing we all remember about the 50th games from the original trilogy is that everything in the arena looks good but is actually poisoned. Wiress’ arena was a game of reflections and this is an arena of halfway recreations. The mutts Haymitch faces with Ampert ‘catch the firelight, making them shine like the hard candy in the Donners’ shop window on a sunny day’. The volcano eruption, even, which gives fatal chemical burns to children, leaves behind ash that dissolves ‘like sugar crystals’.

All of this halfway sweetness, a halfway comforting cake and halfway accurate plants and animals, feels like a symptom and kick in the teeth for Haymitch, our halfway hero. He’s already doomed by the narrative to be unable to achieve anything he aims for in this novel. He can manage halfway, and he’s surrounded by halfway, and he has to try and live with it. Live, but not live well.

Instead of buttermilk, Snow will offer Haymitch milk. It’s got less natural sweetness to it but it’s got a good bit, physically, in common. But swapping buttermilk on New Year’s Day with his family for milk in the arena isn’t a compromise that can make anyone feel better.

Of course, we can’t talk about uncanny recreations without talking about Lou Lou. The creation/transformation of Lou Lou illustrates perfectly and horrifically the Capitol’s approach to making things. The creation of Lou Lou, a child changed and tortured into resembling Louella on the outside but with an inside that can’t be made into a recreation.

She sure looks like Louella. Same size, same height. Heart-shaped face, big gray eyes, long dark braids. Her fingernails are bitten down and there’s a scar on her forehead that matches the one the real Louella got falling off our cistern. She wears the District 12 training outfit, as if she’d dressed at the apartment with us this morning.

Lou Lou is like the birthday cake on the train and the water in the arena – a good recreation on the outside, but lacking something meaningful in the middle that would enable it to be acceptably good, useful, comforting, or nice. We learn how much the ‘middle’ of Lou Lou is wrong, painful and disturbing over time. Her torture is ongoing through the earpiece in her head and the drugs port under her clothes. Her outside is uncanny and her inside is horrific.

The thing I can’t stop thinking about regarding Lou Lou is that the only thing we know about her true, original identity is that she was from District 11. This choice of district is fascinating to me. While it’s not made explicit in the books that everyone in District 11 is Black, every named character from the district and the overwhelming majority of extras in District 11 crowd scenes are Black. Characters from District 12 who aren’t Covey (and we know Louella isn’t) are overwhelmingly white.

While I can’t know what the casting department will do with the ‘real’ Louella McCoy or with the District 11 characters of Sunrise on the Reaping, I was imagining a white Louella from District 12 and four Black tributes from District 11. (I’m happy to be corrected by the movie and I wouldn’t say I’m attached to the idea of Louella being white, but it’s what I pictured, and every fan edit I’ve consumed on TikTok in the last week has used white actresses and models for her, so it’s a widespread assumption.)

So the choice of District 11 as the source for Lou Lou is chilling and horrific. This is the only district with a clear ethnic profile. Imagining how they ‘altered’ the unnamed District 11 girl to make her into Lou Lou sent my mind down a spiral of full-body bleaching and burning. Every inch of her skin has been transformed, very painfully, and the District 11 tributes recognise nothing physical in her when they talk briefly before going into the arena.

Lou Lou is a halfway successful construction - able to look uncannily like Louella but unable to make sense in conversation, behave as instructed, or relate to either District 12 or District 11 peers. We see for sure that she comes across poorly on television and her interview is very odd. So she’s a half-successful solution to the Capitol’s problem, but she’s also become nothing at all. Again and again in this book, a halfway solution is the same as nothing.

At the end of the games, Plutarch suggests explicitly to Haymitch the idea that they have managed part of something.

“You shook up the Capitol, both figuratively and literally, with that earthquake. You were capable of imagining a different future. And maybe it won’t be realized today, maybe not in our lifetime. Maybe it will take generations. We’re all part of a continuum. Does that make it pointless?”

Plutarch is asking Haymitch, and us, to consider the idea that their failed attempt to ruin and end the games has been more than nothing. We the readers, aware that this is the prequel to a book series about a successful revolution, probably believe him. Haymitch lacks our context. How, for him, could what they have managed be more than nothing? A symbolic success full of potential for the future isn’t enough of a partial success to generate any comfort.

After the games, Haymitch’s half-comforts become more and more bleak and desperate. His descent into substance use, too, is a compromise that doesn’t bring him any comfort. Unable to let himself die because of Lenore Dove’s last wish, living in a drunken haze feels like an acceptable half-fulfilment of his promise. Not comforting, but acceptable. He is able to see Lenore Dove in his sleep-syrup haze, but he can’t experience comfort or pleasure with her there, he ‘only [feeds] her gumdrops in [his] dreams’.

The question Haymitch is always asking is: if I sacrifice this, can I keep this? If I let five things hurt me can I keep one that doesn’t hurt? If I agree to be this miserable, can I defend something?

All these compromises, retreats and retrenchments make Haymitch the perfect tragic hero for this prequel-sequel. He can dream of the end but not get there. Whatever he achieves can only ever be a beginning with more work to do.

In the epilogue, which might be the most painful part of the entire series, Haymitch’s ‘happy ending’ is a compromise that’s survivable. He says, ‘I’m content where she’s content’. He still frames his hopes and dreams in statements with conditions. Now, though, there’s a circumstance where he can be not happy, but content. He can live near a couple who got to be in love forever. He can remember something with less pain and drink maybe slightly less, for less desperate reasons.

The version of Lenore Dove he finally becomes able to imagine after three decades and a war is one that lacks the quality of being real, but has the quality of being able to say “I love you like all-fire”. It’s a worse compromise than the one Katniss and Peeta get, but it’s finally one he can live with.

1. Unfortunately my ebook edition of the book makes it very hard for me to provide page numbers for my quotes. It pains me a lot as a grad student in the humanities, but I would have had to buy another copy of the book in order to give you these quotes with page numbers.