To fill in the time I no longer spend reading disturbing news I’m reading more fiction, which can also be disturbing but at least is made up. I finished Peter Heller’s “Burn” in just a few days.
Heller writes literary adventure novels. His first novel, “The Dog Stars,” is about a pilot navigating life in a dystopian America where most people have died in a plague. I thought it was excellent. But for me, he hasn’t lived up to the first time in the three other books I’ve read by him. “Burn” is his seventh work of fiction.
Some of the plot: Jess and Story are lifelong friends who hunt, fish, and camp together every year. They are on a moose hunting trip in remote northern Maine. But when they come back in the direction of civilization they discover a burned-down town and corpses. The secessionist craze that had taken over rural Maine recently has come to a head, and while the men were in the woods, a violent showdown between the secessionists and the federal government has left a scorched earth situation.
How can Storey and Jess get out of here without getting killed? On top of that, they come across a girl hidden in a cupboard, the only survivor in a village, and they take responsibility for her in hopes of returning her to others in her family who had escaped. It’s never explained why her parents abandoned her.
When Heller’s characters get outdoors, nature is front and center—no matter what other crazy stuff is going on—and his writing is straightforward, detailed, and poetic. He’s a disciple of Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway:
They were woken by the rain. Rain drumming the tarp, and rolling thunder, and flashes of distant lightning making brief calligraphy of the interlaced spruce boughs. The tarp was taut and big enough and they were dry.
So they build a nice fire and watched through a scrim of trees the cloud shadows run over the lake and across the ruins of town. Storey dug through the black garbage bags and pulled out four cans of Campbell’s clam shoulder. 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.
I like this close, vivid writing. And I don’t think Heller was compensated by Campbell’s or Leatherman for product placement, but I can’t be sure about that.
The narrative has a lot of momentum, but given that there is only a single plot and story question—will the two men and the young girl survive?—Heller packs the novel with backstory about Jess and Storey from their younger years. And this is the misstep. Backstory is fine, and important, for enriching our understanding of the characters, but Heller made a very weird choice. SPOILER ALERT: Jess’s first sexual experiences were with Storey’s mother. Why!?
Jess has secretly carried this information from Storey all their lives, but it turns out Storey knew all along, and it doesn’t seem to have negatively affected their relationship. But again—why this choice by Heller? It seems random and icky in what is otherwise a gripping and well-written tale. Instead of four 4/5 stars, I have to give this novel 3/5. Read “The Dog Stars” instead.
