This review is also posted at Goodreads. After I wrote it, I thought of James Howard Kunstler's A World Made by Hand, which has a more nuanced and less binary portrayal of the varieties of human experience after society breaks down.
*****
I don't usually review books that have been reviewed to death. Better to
find a worthy, unseen work and lift it up. But I'm making an exception
for Peter Heller's The Dog Stars because I haven't seen a review yet that tapped into the thread it opened up for me.
Like
Heller's main character Hig, flying over a flu-wasted Colorado looking
for someone to connect with, I tried to find a review that spoke to this
passage:
Still we are divided, there are cracks in the
union. Over principle. His: Guilty until—until nothing. Shoot first ask
later. Guilty, then dead. Versus what? Mine: Let a visitor live a minute
longer until they prove themselves to be human? Because they always do.
What Bangley said in the beginning: Never ever negotiate. You are
negotiating with your own death.
The reviews I've read are
enamored with the Mad Max/The Road comparisons with the novel's hopeful
endcap to the apocalypse. Or distracted by syntax. Fragments. No
punctuation. Sex wands exploding. (Well, Hig hadn't had sex for nine
years, so perhaps its rediscovery might be like a Harlequin Romance, but
I digress.)
Don't get me wrong. The Dog Stars is a read-it-in-one-or-two-sittings novel, but unlike Cormac McCarthy's The Road,
this one never brought me to tears. Instead, it made me wonder: Why are
so many readers responding to its "hopefulness" or its poetic treatment
of a world in both decline and regeneration instead of to the
assumption that, even for the sensitive and "weak" HIg, there were so
many Others who could simply be blown away because... well, because they
weren't Hig.
At another point, Hig says: "The ones who are left are mostly Not Nice."
Desperate
souls whose survival was foiled by HIg and his pal Bangley might be
forgiven for thinking the same of the sensitive aviator-poet. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, he ain't.
Most of the other humans portrayed in the
story are ciphers or caricatures worthy of one of those shooting arcade
games the NRA fears is eroding our values. They threaten, they die. A
little or a lot. But prove themselves human? Not a chance.
This
is a serious book by a serious writer, and Heller has clearly posed this
divide between two world views that are severely tested by the
apocalypse. But there isn't much follow through, and there's even less
by the admirers of the book.
I'm wondering if Heller is trying to
make a commentary on how we are living today—not about the future or
some idealized humanity.
Hig's partner Bangley and another
character he meets after he takes his fool's flight west are both
ex-special forces, hardened men who do not make the fine distinctions
that will get Hig killed. In fact, they are portrayed as the soldiers
and Navy Seals protecting us today, projected into a dystopian future.
Although
America has not been wiped out by a virus, we are protected by similar
men and similar values today. We have the luxury of our poetry and
hammock sex and contemplative fly fishing because the Bangleys of the
world have our backs.
In the real world, that is certainly the
view of the Bangleys. The Higs of us who "believe in the possibility of
connectedness" would not survive without the ruthlessness and killing
skills of hard men.
Because Hig finds love and there is new
greenery sprouting in the killed forests, we are encouraged to believe
there is hope. That the apocalypse isn't so bad. That the end isn't the
end.
Arabs, of all people, appear to be patrolling American
skies. Is that an ironic footnote or a reminder that we have so much
capacity to be wrong about Others?
It's not Heller's job to spell it out for us. And thank goodness, in his restraint, he didn't. But what about us readers?
Are we doing our job?
