Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen

She sings. Our song. Which is precisely when my heart begins again. Beats once more. It was meant to be. It was meant to be you. It was meant to be me and you. She walks over to me, and my world is totally silent. I only look at her, and the sensation within me is infinite. She takes hold of me and escorts me out of the door, and I don't resist. The spring night is invigorating. Nature has quietly come to life again, and that's all I hear. There's something beautiful in front of me. From Greenland to infinity, and back again... What a day to be alive. She reads the note I have been carrying around for two weeks. The spring night gives me life, and Sara kisses me. What a day to realise I'm not dead. Love has rescued me. And I realise that this is my coming-out story.

'Crimson and Clover,' she says.
'Over and over,' I reply.

Last Night in Nuuk follows a set of loosely associated living in Greenland's capital city: Fia, Inuk, Arnaq, Ivik, and Sara. Their lives, like the lives of people their age all over the world, are taken up with dating, sex, and partying, to different degrees. Fia is left by her boyfriend and, hooking up with Arnaq after a night of partying, discovers she's gay. Inuk knows he's gay, but Arnaq--the hard-drinking whirlwind at the novel's center--recklessly lets slip that he's been carrying on an affair with a well-known right-wing politician. Ivik is dumped by Sara, and discovers that she--he--is trans. There's a lot of self-discovery going on, this one night in Nuuk.

What is most surprising about Last Night in Nuuk, I suppose, is how familiar the lives of the protagonists is. A reader from outside Greenland who turns to the novel to get a glimpse of the unique features of life in the remote island's largest city will no doubt be, as I was, disappointed. Though it must be said that for Korneliussen, to the extent the novel is written for a world audience at all, this must be the point: look, we're not so out of the ordinary up here.

But even as a novel about hard-partying young people, Last Night in Nuuk really falls flat. Mostly, the prose lies at a level of abstraction that veers into cliche. ("She walks over to me, and my world is totally silent... the sensation within me is infinite...") The specific feelings and sensations of self-discovery are in short supply, and without them, the resonance between Fia's discovery of her sexuality and Ivik's discovery of his gender feels manipulative and cheap. Sara's choice to end every section of her chapter with a hashtag is near unforgiveable. Oh well. 

Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick

Had he not met Glimmung he would never have thought this--realized it. But in Glimmung he witnessed eternal, self-renewing strength. Glimmung, like a star, fed on himself, and was never consumed. And, like a star, he was beautiful; he was a fountain, a meadow, an empty twilight street over which dwelt a fading sky. The sky would fade; the twilight would become darkness, but Glimmung would blaze on, as if burning out the impurities of everyone and everything around him. He was the light who exposed the soul and all its decayed parts. And, with that light, he scorched out of existence those decayed portions, here and there: mementos of a life not asked for.

Joe Fernwright is a "pot-healer": an expert in repairing ancient ceramics. In the polystyrene world of a Philip K. Dick novel, it's a rare skill, and one not much in need. He scrimps and saves, hoping to save enough dimes for a few minutes phone-call to a kind of robot advisor named Mr. Job. If that sounds pathetic, it is: the world described by Dick in Galactic Pot-Healer is one of his dreariest, and the most familiar. Knowledge has been partitioned off into artificial intelligences like Mr. Job and Mr. Encyclopedia, who parcel it out stingily; the robotic systems that organize human life seem almost intentionally withholding and hostile. In this atomized existence, Joe and many others retreat to trivial distractions like "The Game," a silly pastime in which players are made to guess the titles of classic movies and books that have been translated into and out of English, like "The Male Offspring in Addition Gets Out of Bed" for The Sun Also Rises. (Remember doing this with, like, Alta Vista?) It's a meaningless pastime for a meaningless life, one whose diminishment of spirit becomes close to death:

The energy and capacity to fiddle away a lifetime without dignified work, and, in its place, the performance of the trivial, even the voluntarily trivial, as we have constructed here in The Game. Contact with others, he thought; through The Game our isolation is lanced and its body broken. We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances, devoted to nothing in particular, insofar as I can fathom it. Death is very close, he thought. When you think this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.

Suddenly, Joe is contacted by a mysterious presence: an alien life form calling itself Glimmung. Glimmung is something of a divine figure, a shapeshifter who can appear in any form to Joe, but he needs Joe's help, and the help of hundreds of others. On his home world, called Plowman's Planet, Glimmung plans to raise an ancient cathedral called the Heldscalla from where it lay under the planet's great ocean. Joe's pot-healing services are crucial to the cathedral's restoration, and in return for his help, Glimmung promises to bestow upon him a literally inconceivable amount of money. But more improtantly, Joe realizes, he has been given an opportunity to do something non-trivial--to take part, even in a small way, in a great undertaking that might give meaning and purpose to his life.

Any attempt at raising Heldscalla is fraught with risk. Plowman's Planet is peopled by giant rat-like figures who carry around a tome called The Book of Kalends, which is continuously being filled with the dictums of fate, including that of Joe and his new colleagues (like his new bronze-colored alien girlfriend, Mali). The Book of Kalends says that the attempt at raising the cathedral will fail, and Joe and everyone else will be destroyed in the process. But this only means that the raising of Heldscalla takes on a greater metaphorical importance; not only will it mean bringing purpose to the lives of those who raise it, but raising it will mean a victory over the mechanical and deterministic forces of fate and entropy. A sassy robot butler assigned to Joe and Mali explains that all things, even robots, are victims to entropy and fight against it, but there are forces in the world, too, of restoration and recovery, like Joe's pot-healing. The raising of Heldscalla lies at the nexus of the metaphysical and the political: is it more like Christ's victory over Death, or more like the collective seizing the means of production and the path of history?

Galactic Pot-Healer is--well, I guess you can't say it's one of Dick's strangest books, since every book that man wrote seems impossibly strange in its own way. You might say it's his most symbolic. When Joe and Mali descend into the ocean of Plowman's Planet to see the cathedral for themselves--against the wishes of the Glimmung--they discover that there's actually two cathedrals, a black cathedral and a white cathedral. They discover, too, there is a kind of anti-Glimmung who is locked in battle with the Glimmung, and who wishes to raise the black cathedral instead of the white one; this is the image of the eternal agon or something like that. You know, the Manichaean struggle between good and evil, or perhaps, knowing Dick's predilection for Eastern philosophy, something of the yin and yang. The image that will stay with me from this scene, though, is Joe discovering his own dead body, flapping up like a strange fish to advise him on what to do. A lesser writer might feel the need to explain this as a kind of time travel trick, but Dick is content to let the image be just the powerful image it is, a man confronted by the inevitability of his own destruction.

The climax of Galactic Pot-Healer offers Joe the ultimate choice: will he, like the other workers on the project, allow himself to be absorbed into the Glimmung and raise the cathedral with the combination of their skills and consciousnesses? Or will he cling to his individuality and be sent back to his former life, playing stupid word games? How far are we willing to take our dreams of partaking in greatness? I won't say what Joe chooses, but I will say that the novel's final line is possibly Dick's blackest, bleakest joke.

Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker

It's just winter wheat to the people who raise it, only to me it means more than that. It means all the winter and all the cold and the tight feeling of the house in winter, but the rich secret feeling I have, too, of treasure in the ground, growing there for us, waiting for the cold to be over to push up strong and green. They sound like grim words without any comfort to them, but they have a kind of strength all their own.

Ellen Webb, the heroine of Mildred Walker's Winter Wheat, grows up in the wheat country of Montana. The mountains are not so far away, but not visible; the house her father built lies at the bottom of a remote coulee, and all around them the fields of wheat. It's a scene she treasures, but when her college boyfriend Gil comes to see her, the visit becomes tense and awkward. She sees her life from the outside out for the first time: how lonely the house in the coulee must be, how marked by hard labor and the brutal chance of the weather. Gil sees, too, something she has never really seen, a simmering resentment between her father, a native New Englander who came west to farm, and her mother, a Russian peasant girl he picked during World War I.

After Gil leaves, Ellen overhears her parents arguing, and learns a bitter revelation: her mother had pretended to be pregnant to get her father to marry her and take her to the States. This revelation colors not only Ellen's understanding of her parents, but her understanding of her whole life, and casts a pall over the life that she loves. Suddenly, the Cather-like pastoralism of the novel is tinged everywhere with sadness. Ellen reaches to her familiar wheat to understand every new and unfamiliar thing; at the college she observes that the fried eggs are "like daisy heads with their yellow centers and white petals"; she describes her disconsolate suitemate as resembling a "bum lamb that's going to die." The lovely pastoral prose of Winter Wheat is the kind of thing you might call "a love letter to rural Montana," but Ellen's dislocation from her family and her life shade them with sad and subtle layers.

The wheat harvest does not come in; Ellen's experience at college ends after a year. Instead, she takes a position as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in a place even more remote. She becomes close to the father of one of the pupils, and becomes entangled in their own drama of alienation and discontent--the young boy identifies with his evangelical mother and distrusts his father for his (relatively mild) drinking habit. The book is punctuated by a moment of utter tragedy when (spoiler alert) a "feeble-minded" student disappears in the middle of a raging snow storm and is frozen to death. Her attempts to find him are heroic, bordering on recklessness, but she cannot save him, and the death of the boy seems to come at the hand of the same cruel chance that kills the wheat at the root.

I really enjoyed this. I'm just a sucker for Cather, and while she is, of course, the goat, it seemed to me that Walker shares something of that keen eye that sees the fine distinctions in a landscape that might seem featureless to the rest of the world. I thought the story was simple, sweetly sad, and persuasive.

Two Books About Vergil and The Aeneid

No doubt I will eventually fade away and be lost in oblivion, as I would have done long ago if the poet hadn't summoned me into existence. Perhaps I will become a false dream clinging like a bat to the underside of the leaves of the tree at the gate of the underworld, or an owl flitting in the dark oaks of Albunea. But I won't have to tear myself from life and go down into the dark, as he did, poor man, first in his imagination, and then as his own ghost. We each have to endure our own afterlife, he said to me once, or that is one way to understand what he said. But that dim loitering about, down in the underworld, waiting to be forgotten or reborn--that isn't true being, not even half as true as my being is as I write and you read it, and nowhere near as true as in his words, the splendid, vivid words I've lived in for centuries.

The Aeneid, Vergil's masterpiece about the founding of Rome by Aeneas, a fugitive from the Fall of Troy, was nearly lost to history: as he lay sick at the port of Brundisium, Vergil famously demanded that the unfinished manuscript be burned. The emperor Augustus countermanded the poet, who was his friend and client, and it could be argued that, of all the emperor's most lasting achievements, this is the one with the most persistent and important legacy. But why was it that Vergil demanded his masterpiece be burned? Was it simple deathbed despair, knowing that he'd be unable to shape it in the final way he desired? Or was there a deeper, more profound change of heart at work?

Ursula K. Le Guin's novel Lavinia gives us brief glimpses of the poet, lying at Brundisium, tortured by the incompleteness of his work. Vergil appears as a shade--a ghost--to Lavinia, a character in The Aeneid, and, as Le Guin argues, the greatest avatar of the poem's incomplete nature. Through these visits, Lavinia becomes aware that she has no historic reality in the same sense that the poet does, that she is a character in the poem, and she responds with force and insight to the poet who is unable to explain why she has no voice--literally, I think, she never speaks--in his poem. Lavinia is attracted to the dying poet in all sense of the word attraction; throughout the novel she describes him as one of her life's true loves--the other, of course, being Aeneas himself. Her livingness and liveliness are reproof to Vergil, who has enough will left to despair about what he has forgotten to include, but not enough to make the necessary edits that would recover Lavinia's perspective.

Lavinia seems now like a forerunner to a micro-genre that focuses on the "unspoken" stories of women in ancient literature, like Madeline Miller's novel Circe and Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, written from the perspective of the captive Trojan Briseis. I haven't read Circe, but I do think Le Guin achieves what Barker only attempts: a convincing version of the "other side of the story." Le Guin does this by making the composition of the narrative the subject of the novel; Lavinia's reflections on her own fictionality are its most persuasive and moving parts. Le Guin has Vergil appear to Lavinia at a shrine, blurring the lines between the writer and the divine. Lavinia accepts the poet's control over her life as she might accept the will of the gods; in this way the novel offers a meditation on contingency and powerless that transcend narrower themes of gender and patriarchy.

In The Aeneid, Lavinia is the subject of the war between the newcomer Aeneas and the Rutulian prince Turnus. A novelist like Miller and Barker might have had Lavinia resist both men, but Le Guin's Lavinia is content to live out the will of the author-god that she marry Aeneas, and her marriage to Aeneas proves a happy one. (You can see the impulse toward a weaker kind of novel, in which Aeneas' heroic nature is subverted, and he's made into a brute or a monster--not here.) Lavinia has no desire to change the story, but she does want to fill in the gaps, and in doing so she becomes an equal to the poet, or perhaps even his superior, because she has a kind of eternal life that he himself can never possess.

---

Only at the edge of his fields had he walked, only at the edge of his life had he lived. He had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, a lover and yet at the same time a harrassed one, an errant through the passions of the inner life and the passions of the world, a lodger in his own life. And now, almost at the end of his strength, at the end of his search, self-purged and ready to leave, purged to readiness and ready to take upon himself the last loneliness, now destiny with all its forces had seized him again, had forbidden him all the simplicity of his beginnings and of the inner life, had deflected his backward journey once more, had turned him back to the evil which had overshadowed all his days, as if it had reserved for him just this sole simplicity--, the simplicity of dying.

Hermann Broch's landmark modernist novel The Death of Virgil begins with the same question as Lavinia: why did Vergil want to burn his masterpiece? Broch's answer is different, but perhaps the same, having to do with incompleteness and insufficiency, not in a narrative sense, but a metaphysical one. Broch's novel followed Vergil in the last twenty-four hours in life, being ferried by Augustus to Brundisium, fighting with the emperor and his literary executors about his final wishes, and succumbing to a raging fever. The fever brings the poet close to death, and close to death he begins to understand the true nature of the world, and the more he understands this true nature, the more he understands that literature grasps at something it by nature can never achieve, and its attempts are perhaps more than fruitless, but a lie.

The Death of Virgil's stream-of-consciousness is no easy read. I couldn't tell you honestly that I understood more than half of it, but there are pleasurable incomprehensibilities as well as frustrating ones, and I enjoyed the rolling, rollicking nature of Broch's writing, which recalls the rocking of the sea on which Vergil arrives at Brundisium. What I did understand is that Broch's metaphysics hinge on the falseness of perception and the seduction of beauty, which substitutes a pleasing falsehood in place of true perception, which might instead reveal a fundamental unity in the universe. Literature is metaphor, and can only point toward the unity, but in doing so it cannot participate in that unity, and so the poet's words, like all words, can only ever be false. I could be wrong about some of the particulars there, but it did seem to me that Broch shares in the general modernist suspicion of the literary project and its ability to describe the world, and like other modernists he reaches back to the literature of the past to try to provide a framework that expresses the growing slippage at the same time that it stabilizes it.

Broch's Vergil passes in and out of lucidity. He's visited by real people, like the emperor and his doctor, and sometimes he's visited by phantasms, including a beautiful servant boy, a mercurial slave, and the likeness of his beloved, Plotia. At times it's not clear who's real and who's a phantasm, but of course, we are asked to understand that such hard dichotomies belong to a world of limitations that Vergil is currently leaving behind. One of the most interesting sections of the book is a long, drawn-out argument with Augustus, who rebukes Vergil for his wish to burn The Aeneid, claiming its importance in expressing the myth of the Roman state. Augustus' resemblance to 20th century European fascism is hard to miss: he claims the superiority of the state over the individual, and claims literature for the state. Vergil's response to Augustus preserves not only the primacy of the individual but the individual as the locus of metaphysics. If the true world is to be perceived and experienced, it can only be done as the individual, and though the literary project can only fail, it must fail on the individual's terms.

Both Lavinia and The Death of Virgil seize on the doubts inherent in the legend of The Aeneid: what was it that so important, so lacking, so insufficient, in a work now considered one of the greatest produced by history? For Le Guin, the answer lies in the narrative itself, teasing out its blind spots, placing the writer and the text in a kind of generative dialectic. For Broch, the answer lies in the failure of literature itself. Both books, I think, return us to the greatness of The Aeneid by enlarging it, rather than diminishing it.

Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber

...my book, I thought, once complete, would be a towering wall of scholarship, difficult to approach, harder to ascend, wholly original in its design, but once admitted, a universe would emerge like a solar flare or the birth of a galaxy, yes, I thought, the birth of a galaxy and sure, only the strong would survive, but deep inside a colossus burgeoned, and just because I envisioned the book but hadn't yet written the book, hadn't in fact even begun writing the book, didn't mean the book didn't exist, I thought, because the groundwork had been laid, the seeds planted, and to conceive hundreds of titles for a book but no book seemed the pinnacle of cruelty.

Mark Haber's new book Lesser Ruins extends over a single moment, not much more than five or ten minutes. The scholar-narrator is trying to begin his book about the French essayist Montaigne, but he has no real material to work from; all he has is a list of titles like The Intrusion of Distraction and The Boots of Stupidity. He finds himself unable to conjure up the kind of slow thinking he needs to really work on the book. Slow thinking, he tells us, is in deep decline, and he blames the damn smartphones, but the truth is that his mind is just elsewhere: on the recent death of his wife after a long struggle with dementia, on his dismissal from the college after what has come to be known as "the espresso incident," on coffee, of which he is a connoisseur who speaks with much more knowledge and passion than he seems to be able to about Montaigne, about a disastrous residency in the Berkshires, about his son, Marcel. It's Marcel, actually, who's calling him to talk about his obsession with house music; the novel takes place almost entirely from the point that the phone rings to the moment when the narrator finally picks up the call and hears Marcel's voice.

You get about a third of the way through Lesser Ruins before you realize something: this guy hasn't really said anything about Montaigne at all. He doesn't seem to be lying, necessarily, or stupid; he quotes liberally from other writers, but there isn't a single scrap of text from Montaigne in the book. The stuff he does talk about is irrelevant, like his association with a Russian duelist or his dandy manservant, details which, if I had to guess, are actually made up by Haber. In a book that is often cruel and sad, the cruelest and saddest moment may be when the administrator in charge of the residency in the Berkshires admits that each year they admit a mediocre non-entity, just in the off chance that they'll be surprised. Our narrator, it seems, is this year's non-entity, but he hasn't surprised anyone, except in the sense that he has been rude and off-putting, and that everyone kind of wants him to leave.

Lesser Ruins is less a book about literature or scholarship and more a book about the desire to produce literature, the yearning to produce scholarship. Just as the legendary painting in his previous book, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, suggests a kind of pretense of Renaissance art but really has nothing to do with it, so Lesser Ruins is not about Montaigne but about the sort of person who longs to write something meaningful about Montaigne. There's a master stroke in this, frankly, not only because we don't want to be lost in the details of the "real" Montaigne, but because it allows us to see the link between the narrator's obsessive inadequacy with his son Marcel's, Marcel who longs to create the perfect "club mix," or whatever. Lesser Ruins, it must be said, knows much more about house music than it does Montaigne, and the ironic contrast is deeply funny. Perhaps the most sympathetic thing about the deluded narrator is that, though he can't stand his son's music, he clearly listens to everything his son says, otherwise how would he be able to regurgitate all the terms that Marcel throws out, like "four-on-the-floor" and "Balearic Disco" and "Four Tet?"

Lesser Ruins is structured in three parts, each as a single kind of stream-of-consciousness without paragraph breaks. The transitions are of the "French door" variety, in which the narrative slips from scene to scene and subject to subject without declaring itself. And yet it's never a challenge to read. Just the opposite: the way it moves quickly from humor to pathos and back again draws you in and pushes you forward. For the narrator, as perhaps for all of us, everything comes back to a handful of obsessions. Some are silly, but some of them touch the deepest parts of us, like the death of the narrator's wife, which haunts the novel heavily. Her dementia, we understand, is not to blame for his distraction or inadequacy--but it doesn't help. And it suggest to us that perhaps there is a link between the kind of obsession with writing, with making music, with leaving your mark, and the black despair of loss and grief. It's important that his wife doesn't merely die, but loses her powers of reason. Our narrator is committed to his writing because, in some sense, he understands how brief and rare reason and creativity are; they are much briefer, in fact, than life itself. And even in the face of their insufficiency, and the frightening prospect that distractions are pulling you away from them at every moment, you plow on, to try to get the words on paper.

Woman Running in the Mountains by Yuko Tsushima

For an instance Takiko closed her eyes and pictured herself holding a baby lightly to her breast and running at top speed. This was the way she had gone on imagining herself, while her mother's crying and her father's shouting echoed around her, ever since her mother had found out she was pregnant. At school she hadn't actually liked running at all, yet now she couldn't stop seeing this image of herself. It was not that she was running away. She just wanted to be tough and free and to move. A state that knew no emotion. To be allowed to exist without knowing emotion.

Early one winter morning, Takiko rises and finds that her water has broken. She gets up and calls herself a cab to the maternity ward while her mother, father, and brother sleep. She is too young to have a child, they think, and the father--a married man with whom Takiko had a brief, passionless affair--has no idea that she got pregnant. Her father beats her; her mother implores her to have the child aborted. But Takiko yearns to have her child. For her, the birth of her son, Akira, is an entrance into a world of independence and freedom, in which perhaps she can become a caretaker rather than a subordinate, driftless and subject to the whims of others. She has vivid dreams of herself on a field of ice, or running through the mountains (hence the title), and yet, in these images of isolation and movement the child is always with her.

What I liked best about Woman Running in the Mountains is the way that author Yuko Tsushima recognized the inherent drama in the everyday experiences of a mother. Takiko is carefully and specifically drawn, unique, and yet her experiences are not so different than those of other Japanese mothers, the kind she often comes into contact with at the maternity ward or the cooperative daycare. Tsushima avoids reproducing certain conservative ideas about the way motherhood ennobles a woman, or gives them purpose, or depicting Takiko as a reluctant mother who must learn to embrace the maternal nature of femininity. Instead, the novel does something quietly powerful in recognizing the possibilities that motherhood provide in fostering independence: it's becoming a mother that ultimately gives Takiko the strength to turn away from her cruel father and overbearing mother. 

As a single mother without employment, Takiko faces a number of obstacles, both practical and cultural. (Apparently, as the notes describe, it's very rare for a Japanese child to be born "illegitimate.") She struggles to find a childcare placement for Takiko; she struggles to find a job. The jobs she do find demand more of her time than she, as a new mother, can afford. Akira turns out to have been born with a hernia, an issue requiring a surgery she can scarcely afford. Tsushima solves Takiko's problems by providing her a job at a nursery whose greenhouses are high in the mountains where her dreams take place. And yet, this job comes with its own obstacles: she falls deeply in love with a gruff older gardener who cannot return her affections. And yet, in the nursery, Takiko herself flowers. It's a job she's pushed toward by her motherhood, a process, Tsushima suggests, by which she becomes more herself.

Fire by George R. Stewart

He slapped at a spark, and in new panic at the thought of spot-fires, stood up to look ahead. Smoke was rising from a spot-fire well in front of him, to the left. But he felt sudden relief when he saw that the closest fir tree was scarcely a hundred feet away. Energetic again with the thought of safety and rest, he plunged ahead, just as a white sheet of searing-hot flame went up from a bush not thirty feet behind him. He burst through the bushes, climbed and walked across them, crawled beneath them. His face and hands, and his bare arm, were crisscrossed with bleeding scratches. He kept his eyes half-closed  to protect them from smoke and from twigs. Almost blindly, in an animal-like intensity to live, he struggled on, keeping direction by the drift of the smoke.

George R. Stewart's Fire is, in obvious ways, a companion book to his novel Storm. Both deal with enormous, large scale natural disasters; Fire only replaces the water with, well, fire. Both take an ultra-wide view, taking as subject hundreds of people whose jobs are to manage the impacts of the disaster. In Fire, that means fire-spotters, foresters, firefighters, weathermen, pilots, ranchers, and more. But there are certain differences that make Fire an interesting contrast to Storm, largely downstream of the nature of a forest fire vs. a storm. The view, which is only as wide as the disaster, is necessarily shrunken, down to a few thousand acres, rather than hundreds of square miles and several states. The result is that the human drama comes to the forefront more easily; instead of distant figures working independently--Storm's linemen and weathermen have nothing to do with each other except the fact that they are working to respond to the same storm--the crew arrayed against the forest fire must work together, in concert and in close quarters.

I really enjoyed, for instance, the tension between the young Supervisor and the section chief, Bart. "The Super" is intelligent and capable but anxious about how he's perceived by his subordinates; he tells people to call him "Slim" but the nickname never takes. Bart is an experienced old hand responsible for the section of the Lassen National Forest that is burned. The Super astutely wonders if Bart is too close to the forest, too sentimental, to exert his judgment properly, but he knows that if he removes the popular man as fire chief, his authority and respect will be undermined. I thought that Fire did a good job of illuminating the ways that disasters are helped along by human limitations: the fire is contained until one of the fire fighters gets spooked and runs, starting a general panic that allows the line to be broken and grow out of control. It's a stark reminder that the systems we rely on are actually made up of people, with all their human flaws.

The book doesn't do very well by one of its more interesting characters, Judith, a young woman who takes a lonely job as a fire lookout for the summer. Judith is a woman in a man's world, and in one sense this makes her thoughtful and interesting, quoting literature to herself in her lonely outpost, but it also means that every male Forest Service employee who comes across her has to remark on how hot she is. There's an interesting connection between the way the novel makes use of Judith's femininity and the paranoid fantasies of Bart, who imagines his section of the forest as a virginal young woman being preyed on by the lascivious fire. In the end, Judith is married off, paired to a shy young man who literally carries her out of harm's way when the fire approaches her lookout. So much for the independent woman in her tower.

But for the most part, I really enjoyed Fire. It's an old book, written in 1948, presumably before much of modern fire suppression technique was created--no one, for instance, thinks about doing a controlled burn anywhere in the forest. But to my understanding, much of the job is the same: people dig big ditches around a fire to keep it from spreading. As in 1948, the coordination and spur-of-the-moment planning must be enormous. The "Spitcat Fire" of the novel ends up burning something like 13,000 acres, a number that seems almost quaint in the climate change era. The Park Fire that burned through the Lassen area this summer torched over 400,000 acres. So perhaps it would do well for us to remember the book's lesson about the human courage, and the human toll, that disasters demand.