Delighted cries rang out like the song of so many mockingjays when it was announced last week that Suzanne Collins is to publish a prequel to her multimillion-selling trilogy The Hunger Games, 10 years after Katniss hung up her bow and took a well-earned rest after uniting Panem. The new book (out next year) will be set 64 years before the originals, on the morning of the reaping of the 10th Hunger Games. Perhaps it takes a decade or so before disillusionment with the system of harvesting your youngsters for a televised death match begins to set in.
Prequels can be a very big deal, especially in children’s and young adult fiction where the appetite for more information and stories about beloved characters and worlds can hardly be sated (though adults are not exempt – we fall just as hard for books like The Enemy, in which Lee Child takes us back to a time before the first Jack Reacher book’s setting, or 2006’s Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris, which fleshes out the cannibal we first met in 1981’s Red Dragon). There are many examples, particularly in the parts of the YA fantasy genre and series fiction where the publishers’ focus is more on quantity than quality, of authors nipping back and forth across the timeline to expand the characters’ universes and – one must assume – sales. But others are more carefully considered and make a true and lasting contribution to the fictional world and the story told. Where would CS Lewis’s Narnia chronicles be, for example, without The Magician’s Nephew and The Horse and His Boy? They are both prequels to Prince Caspian and the former is also a prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. No nephew (and rings and pools and foundation myths), no Narnia. Joan Aiken’s The Whispering Mountain is a prequel to her glorious Wolves chronicles and every bit as good as the rest of that rollicking Dickensian series. Special mention must go to Peter Dickinson’s The Changes trilogy; the internal chronology of The Weathermonger (1968), Heartsease (1969) and The Devil’s Children (1970) is the exact reverse of publication order.
Philip Pullman, though he is not a huge fan of the books being characterised this way, has given us what is generally very much considered a prelude to His Dark Materials with the first two books of another trilogy, The Book of Dust, which includes characters and events from the first series. Let’s not get into the vexed question of the precise relationship of The Silmarillion to The Lord of the Rings (begun before Tolkien’s masterwork, published posthumously and containing … multitudes), but those who claim The Hobbit is a prequel to The Lord of the Rings are simply mistaken; set before and written before the major events of Middle-earth, it is simply a first instalment (albeit amended in later editions by the author as work progressed on the sequels) that has been dwarfed by the success of the rest. (Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys, the overlooked prequel to the runaway Trainspotting may feel its pain.)
Adult fiction prequels abound too, from the likes of Porto Bello Gold by Arthur D Howden Smith (a competent tale of how Captain Flint and Murray gained and buried their loot, written 50 years after Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, though whether as a cynical attempt to cash in or as an early piece of fan fiction it is hard to tell) to books such as Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, the story of Mr Rochester’s “mad” wife and likely to endure as long as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre itself.
Overall, perhaps because they have a destination point already set, prequels have a better reputation than most sequels. There may be diminishing returns, of course. I wouldn’t waste too much time on 2012’s The Family Corleone, if I were you.
Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading is published by Vintage.
