Like a lot of readers in these unnerving times, I’m a sucker for a dystopian novel. Imagining how things might go wrong is oddly comforting: it’s better to have a clear picture of a broken civilization than to be mired in the muck of unknowing.
The hook for Burn, Peter Heller’s new novel, is a strong one. Two friends since childhood — Jess, the sensitive yet stoical protagonist, and his best friend, quick-witted and sharp-shooting Storey — who often take extended hunting and fishing trips together, emerge from a moose hunting trek in the vast, lightly populated regions of western Maine only to find a town burned to the ground. While there are a few blackened corpses in the streets, most of the people are gone, perhaps, it is suggested, rounded up and taken to some distant internment camp. Maine, evidently, has been embroiled in arguments for and against secession all summer, and everything has come to a head while the two men have been out in the woods.
There’s a telecommunications blackout, so it takes a while to figure out just what happened and who the good and bad guys are. Indeed, until the second half of the book, it’s hard to know who Jess, Storey, and the author himself are rooting for. It turns out the more rural and conservative part of Maine has seceded from the rest of the state following the assassination of a fictional U.S. President, whose party affiliation is never stated. Our protagonists would appear to be left-leaning — Jess is an introspective furniture maker in Denver and Storey is an English professor at the University of Vermont, one of the most liberal institutions in the country — but they are also country boys brought up on hunting, fishing, and wilderness survival, and it gradually becomes evident that their sympathies are with the rebels rather than the evil and ruthless federal government.
For most of its length, Burn is incredibly detailed, as in this passage describing Jess and Storey preparing some food they have scavenged:
“So they built a nice fire and watched through a scrim of trees the cloud shadows run over the lake and across the ruins of the town. Storey dug through the black garbage bags and pulled out four cans of Campbell’s clam chowder. He opened them with the can opener on his new Leatherman and slid a plastic spoon carefully up the inside and pulled out the contents with a suck of air and the plop of a mostly intact cylinder of stew.”
Hyperrealism like this is especially important in a novel where other elements of the world we know are very different, and Heller creates a believable environment for his story. There are notes of Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy throughout the book, with Heller focusing on the good sense and practicality of his two heroes. While they are thoughtful twenty-first century males (the year in which the book is set is never made clear, but it’s obviously the near future) who respect women and the environment, they know how to do things with guns and knives and axes that would make the average urban schlub’s head spin.
The adventure parts of the novel are compelling and fast moving, but we are also presented with frequent flashbacks in which Jess muses over his childhood with Storey’s family and the demise of his long and mostly happy marriage. McCarthy did a bit of this pre-catastrophe reminiscing in The Road, but not much, and while Heller rightly eschews the incredibly dark and violent realm of that earlier novel, Burn would have benefited from fewer pages in the past and more emphasis on the present, where the real conflict is taking place.
Towards the end of the novel, the trio must cover a great deal of ground on foot, and we skim over many days in a few paragraphs in a way that feels too rushed, as though Heller were overly eager to get to his exciting conclusion. The final 30 pages are among the most action-packed, although they, too, move at a somewhat hurried pace, with the ending abrupt yet not entirely surprising.
Despite these modest flaws, Burn does an admirable job of straddling the demands of literary and popular fiction, and it is a worthy addition to the ever-growing body of work devoted to the often terrifying prospects we face when we look into the years ahead.
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.
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