The Dog Stars - Peter Heller - guest review

I would usually avoid "post-apocalypse" fiction like the proverbial plague - for me it's usually just too bleak and too brutal.  However, I'm so glad I made an exception for The Dog Stars as I found it utterly compelling from the first page to the last, and it moved me more than any book I've read in a while.

The story is narrated by Hig, one of a very small number of people who've survived a disastrous flu-like epidemic that wiped out most of the human race, at a time when global warming is also devastating the planet's wildlife.  Hig and his beloved dog Jasper live on an airfield in the Colorado Rockies, in an uneasy alliance with Hig's trigger-happy and sardonic neighbour, the aptly-named Bangley. Together they eke out an existence, pooling their skills to ensure their survival: Bangley, with his arsenal of weapons, keeps constant watch for invasions by scavengers, shooting to kill on sight; Hig's duties include growing vegetables for them to eat and patrolling the skies of their "territory" in his Cessna. Theirs is a bleak, harsh and lonely existence, pared back to the very basics of survival and filled with suspicion of all other human beings in case they're contagious or hostile, or both.  Hig, however, spends much of his time thinking about his life "Before", contrasting it with the spartan and often violent life he has to lead now and mourning all that he has lost, particularly in human terms.

In the course of Hig's sorties in his Cessna and his trek into the mountains to hunt we come to know him well, despite the rather terse and fragmented style in which he tells his story.  We sympathise completely with his grief and his guilt at having survived, and with his yearning for something more than his existence with Bangley currently holds.  In many ways while reading The Dog Stars I was reminded of Antoine de St Exupery's Le Petit Prince, one of my favourite books of all time: at the heart of both books are the existential themes of love and friendship, loneliness and loss, and above all the urge to find some meaning in an apparently absurd and meaningless existence.  Hig's pivotal decision to fly his plane beyond the point of no return (ie the point at which he still has enough fuel to fly back) is a last desperate attempt to find something - or someone - that will make his life purposeful again and justify the battle to carry on existing.  Of Bingley, Hig says "he had been waiting for the End all his life... He didn't do anything that wasn't aimed at surviving", but Hig himself needs more than this; he not only values the beauty of the mountains and the vital warmth of human connection with other living beings, but needs them almost as much as he needs food and water.  By the end of the book (and without giving too much away) Hig has found peace and hope and, although the ending is subtly nuanced with potential new threats that might temper Hig's incipient optimisim, overall the reader is left uplifted by man's ability to transcend his circumstances, no matter how grim.

In some ways The Dog Stars did bear out my prejudices about post-apocalypse fiction: although this book has many moments of great beauty and tenderness, there's no denying that Hig's world is a bleak and brutal one and there are a number of violent and sometimes shocking episodes.  From a stylistic point of view too it isn't always an easy read: it's not so much a conventional narrative as Hig's own interior monologue and is written in short, choppy fragments and incomplete phrases as he interrupts his own train of thought and changes tack. The lack of speechmarks in dialogue likewise takes some getting used to.  However, I became engrossed in Hig's story very quickly and found I got used to the stylistic quirks within a few pages. What's more, I felt the style really helped me get under Hig's skin and empathise with him.  These are his unfiltered thoughts and his raw emotions, and the style lends an immediacy and directness that heighten the emotional power of Hig's story.

The blurb on the cover describes The Dog Stars as "a novel about the end of the world that makes you glad to be alive" which is a pretty big promise, but I have to say it did exactly that and I have no doubt this will be one of my top 10 books of the year for that very reason. It presents a frightening vision of a possible future for mankind that, in light of recent flu epidemics and evidence of global warming, seems all too depressingly likely, and yet Hig's quest to find something meaningful, against all the odds, in his brutal, barren world cannot fail to leave you feeling there are some seeds of hope.  As Hig himself says, "Life is tenacious if you give it one bit of encouragement," and as long as there are Higs in the world it will also be bearable.

Reviewed by Penny Tattersall - guest reviewer

Huge thanks to Penny for reading and reviewing this book for The Little Reader Library!

Published by Headline

The Crane Wife - Patrick Ness - guest review

Oh my word, Patrick Ness has done it again.  Like A Monster Calls and his Chaos Walking trilogy, The Crane Wife is a powerful and heart-stirring book with big themes.  It's both wise and funny, immensely readable and very memorable, this is one of those rare books that leaves me sad I've read it and don't still have it to look forward to.  I'm quite sure it will be one of my top 10 favourite books of 2013.

George, middle-aged and divorced, is woken in the night by an unearthly cry, "a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt." On going out into the garden to investigate, he discovers  a large bird, a crane, wounded by an arrow through its wing.  George does what any decent man would do and removes the arrow, leaving the bird free to fly away.  The next day at work, as George mulls over these strange events, the elegant and mysterious Kumiko walks into his life, a woman who, like the cry heard in the night, will lodge in his heart, changing his life forever.

This is the hauntingly beautiful opening to a multifaceted story that's about love, imagination and beauty, and about stories. Central to the book is the love affair between George, a man who represents "safety and softness and kindness and respite" and the elusive Kumiko.  In the middle of his mundane and ordinary life, George finds something utterly extraordinary in his love for Kumiko, a love that alters not only his life, but the lives of those around him as well; and the book has something to teach all of us about love, about its possessiveness and its capacity for forgiveness, about the way love can be both selfish and selfless.

At one level, then, this is a beautiful and timeless love story with all the elements of hope, drama and despair to make your heart ache.  As Kumiko puts it, it's about "the extraordinary [that] happens all the time... Life and happiness and heartache and love."  However, rooted in the Japanese folktale of the Crane Wife, a tale that is interwoven through the story of George and Kumiko, this is also a very artfully constructed story about stories, about the stories shared and private that make up the lives of all of us.  The novel is based on age-old fables and legends, with echoes of George and the Dragon and Leda and the Swan as well as the Japanese crane wife fable, and it's a glorious hymn of praise the eternal power of story-telling, and to the sheer physical beauty of books.  George "loved physical books with the same avidity other people loved horses or wine or prog rock... What was more perfect an object than a book?" Ness also points out how every character in every story (real or fictional), and indeed every story teller, will give a slightly interpretation of the tale and, more than this, will keep the story alive with every telling. As George says, for any given incident "there were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life.  A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew. "  Thus Ness himself not only keeps alive the various fables that weave through The Crane Wife, but he adds in something of his own in the telling to create a new tale.  "Stories shift. They change, depending on who is doing the telling."

Of course, the way a tale is told also matters, and Ness has a genius for telling a story that captures both the reader's mind and his heart.  His writing is acute and devastatingly sharp with hardly a wasted word; it's dramatic, tender and witty, and although there is just the occasional phrase that jars slightly, for me this just highlighted the near perfection of the rest of the book.  All the way through I kept trying in vain to work out quite how he creates such yearningly, achingly beautiful stuff from mere ordinary words.  It's a marvellously alchemical gift, rather like the talent George and Kumiko have for creating mesmerisingly beautiful art from mere feathers and the pages of old books.  Although The Crane Wife is anchored very firmly in the mundane real world of George's prosaic job and narrow life, in "real life with all its disappointments", it opens windows to a world that is magical, timeless and wonderful and it stirred my heart in a way that few books can.  If you've any interest at all in love, beauty and what makes us human, you should read this book and let it work its magic on you.

Reviewed by Penny Tattersall

Published by Canongate

Thanks very much to the publisher for a review copy of this novel.

Many thanks to Penny for reading and reviewing this novel for The Little Reader Library