Mohtalim

kacunnin wrote:The premise is the same -- school-age children are forced to fight to the death by a corrupt government. The characterizations, however, are very different. Battle Royal is much more brutal -- graphic and continuous violence, sex, profanity. It is not a children's book. Hunger Games is a YA novel, and as such it focuses more on the relationships between its central characters (an aspect of the trilogy that can become tedious for older readers). I found Battle Royal to be more gripping and more disturbing, with themes that more closely relate to Golding's Lord of the Flies (Takami has a lot to say about the human propensity for violence). Collins' novel is much more focused on how horrible the Panem government is -- Katniss, for example, never finds herself drawn into the horrors of the games the way Takami's characters do. If Takami's novel (like Golding's) illuminates the darkness at the heart of humanity, then Collins's novel (like Orwell's 1984) illuminates the evils of totalitarianism.