“Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement.”
“They bred dogs for everything else, even
diving for fish, why didn’t they breed them to live longer, to live as long as
a man?”
What
happens when roving bands of Arabs rule a disease-stricken land? What happens
when the resources we now take for granted are stolen, fought for and died over
each and every day? What happens when every relationship—save for one—is calculated
on the basis of how much more likely it is that the other person will boost
your chances of survival?
What
happens when the sky is the only safe place left? And is love possible in a
postapocalyptic wasteland?
These
questions and more are posed by Peter Heller in his powerful novel “The Dog
Stars.” The author relies on clipped sentences, creating natural tension with
abrupt, sometimes-jarring prose. The result is a rather frightening story,
though it occasionally reads like a journal or shorthand, which can make it
difficult to follow at times. The fragmentation also lends a very interesting
perspective to how you read and digest the book. Yet Heller is also capable of
throwing a beautiful line (“How we gentle
our losses into paler ghosts.”) on an unsuspecting reader, as well as occasional
humor (“You look like a homeless hockey
player.”)
Heller’s
protagonist, Hig, is nearly a decade into his survival over a mass death event wrought
by an autoimmune disease likened to “AIDS with T cells.” Yet he admits that,
despite scattered moments of peace and solitude, he has been merely hanging on
almost involuntarily, instead of truly living whatever life he can carve out in
this new landscape.
“I cannot live like this. Cannot live at all
not really. What was I doing? Nine years of pretending.”
“It caught me sometimes: that this was okay.
Just this. That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived
moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have
peace.
At a
deserted airport, Hig is forced into an alliance with his gun-nut neighbor,
Bangley, as almost involuntarily they both become completely reliant on each
other for survival. Hig finds himself unable to hide some of his thoughts and
feelings from Bangley, because even though they may jeopardize his status with
Bangley, he has a need to share, find some common ground. I found the
Hig-Bangley dynamic to be very similar to the Rick-Shane juxtaposition from
“The Walking Dead”; essentially, an optimistic, moralistic approach vs. a
pessimistic, realistic approach.
“Half the time with Bangley I’m thinking
about all the stuff I should never say.”
“If I get caught short and killed one day
it’s because I’m too soft. Right? Is it worth living the other way? Bangley’s
way? Well, I’m an apprentice. Still. An acolyte in the School of Bangley. Just
by living here. And not too great at it. Still.”
“For Bangley, we only get so many fuckups
before the jaws close ... That’s what steams him the most. He doesn’t want to
lose because he suffered some fool.”
Bangley’s
code is more in line with the shift that has taken place in the world, while at
the same time it may be leading to the schisms that rip nations and people
apart—regardless of geography or volume of land.
Hig’s
incredible, adaptable dog, Jasper, has become his de-facto family in the new
world order, though Hig must also come to terms with the realization that not
only has Bangley joined that family, but they have become “like a married
couple”—this despite marked and likely irreconcilable philosophical differences
in how they perceive the globe they now live on.
“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 your own
death.”
“Me versus him. Follow Bangley’s belief to
its end and you get a ringing solitude. Everybody out for themselves, even to
dealing death, and you come to a complete aloneness. You and the universe. The
cold stars. Like these that are fading, silent as we walk. Believe in the
possibility of connectedness and you get something else. A tattered union suit
flying on a flagpole. Help asked and given. A smile across a dirt yard, a wave.
Now the dawn not so lonely.”
The unlikely
duo must constantly stave off raids from outsiders who envy and cherish all the
resources that Hig and Bangley have at their plum location. The rote that
killing has become due to this—the normal part of the routine it has developed
into, the way he has become used to it—frankly terrifies Hig. Within this
realization is an acknowledgment that he must embrace some fundamental change
in how he views his new life to avoid turning into Bangley.
Yet
in the end, the essential humanity involved in forging a relationship with
someone based on mutually assured survival overcomes all divides—philosophical,
spiritual, ideological, emotional. It is set against this backdrop—and that of
Bangley’s mortality—that Hig stumbles
upon the tie he has created with Bangley.
“Never know how you feel about someone until
their house is torn open ... Never know how you feel about someone until they
die and come back.”
Despite
the forced bond with Bangley, it becomes apparent that Hig’s true remaining
loves are Jasper and his 1956 Cessna 182 airplane. Hig views his ability to fly
as carrying a responsibility along with it, and he becomes a steward for the
Mennonites—a community afflicted with the blood disease but not yet dead—which give
him some level of human contact and sense of community and helping.
However,
there is much more to the gift of flight that Hig treasures—and Bangley
suspects. The act of escape, of freedom, of distancing oneself from all that is
pain, up close and unavoidable.
“From up here there was no misery, no
suffering, no strife, just pattern and perfection. The immortal stillness of a
landscape painting.”
“And for a time while flying, seeing all
this as a hawk would see it, I am myself somehow freed from the sticky details:
I am not grief sick nor stiffer in the joints nor ever lonely, nor someone who
lives with the nausea of having killed and seems destined to kill again. I am
the one who is flying over all of it looking down. Nothing can touch me.
“There is no one to tell this to and yet it
seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to
escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.”
Despite
a dramatic encounter with a group of savage rapists and plunderers—when a
specific object owned by one pushes Hig over the edge and into violence he
can’t avoid—the early part of the book was really a tale/tail of a boy and his
dog, with the touching, emotional events that occur between the two leading to
tears for both narrator and reader. The aspect of the story was so powerful and
painful that this reader needed to get out of the world of the book for a few
days.
The
loss is so enormous and almost unfathomable that Hig is rendered unable to move
by his inability or unwillingness to process it.
“You can’t metabolize the loss. It is in the
cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of your gut.
Muscle sinew bone. It is all of you.”
“Grief is an element. It has its own cycle
like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in
and out of everything.”
“Jasper. Little brother. My heart.”
His
identity was tied up in taking care of Jasper, even though the relationship was
symbiotic. And the chasm between he and Bangley is never so evident as when he
tries to explain his lack of rational thinking in the hours after saying
goodbye to Jasper.
“Before I could locate myself: I am a
widower. I am fighting for survival. I am the keeper of something, not sure
what, not the flame, maybe just Jasper. Now I couldn’t. I didn’t know what I
was. So grieve.”
“You got in your plane and flew past your
point of no return. In a world maybe without any more good fuel. You left a
safe haven, a partnership that worked. For a country that is not at all safe,
where anyone you meet is most likely going to try to kill you. If not from
outright predation then from disease. What the fuck were you thinking? Hig.
“My dog died, I said.”
Hig
doesn’t have much time to consider what a void of companionship may mean to
him, as he’s quickly launched into a scenario where he’s being stalked by nine
pursuers, ramping up the intensity to 11. Bangley proves his worth by saving
Hig’s skin, which leads to some revelations about Bangley that came almost too
late for Hig, who bids him an surprisingly emotional goodbye as Hig takes to
the skies to see what else the horizon and life might hold.
“We have traveled.
Now you will be the path
I will walk I will walk
Over you.”
Through
flashbacks, we are periodically given insight into Hig’s pre-cataclysm life. We
eventually learn that he was forced to free his pregnant wife of the sickness
in a gut-wrenching way. Though she is scarcely talked about, the words used by
Hig to describe the pain involved in easing her passage makes the impact
evident.
“I’d been crying. I tried with every ounce
not to, not to weep as I saw my world, everything in it of any importance,
vanishing from my grip.”
The
book’s true pivot point came in the aftermath of the loss, as Hig makes a
conscious decision to go beyond simply trying to survive. He must embrace and
accept that he has the freedom and right to search for something more, to yearn
for more meaning, to attempt to construct some real life beyond the horror of
where they now found themselves.
“Nothing to lose is very close to the
Samurai You are already dead. That’s
what I told myself.”
“In that instant I knew what I had come for
... It was to be glad again to be alive.”
“Nothing to lose is so empty, so light, that
the sand you crumble to at last blows away in a gust, so insubstantial that
it’s carried upwards to shirr into the sandstorm of the stars. That’s where we
all get to. The rest is just wearing thin waiting for wind.”
It is
during one of his visits to the Mennonites, when their inability to have any
kind of human contact truly reveals itself, that he arrives at this internal
decision to quest for more and better.
“It was Jasper, not just. It was all of it.
Was this hell? To love like this, to grieve from fifteen feet, an uncrossable
distance?”
“I met her hazel eyes, a little bloodshot
with the immune system war raging inside her, and held to her tiny fingers for
a long moment, held to them like they were a rope and I was a man drowning.”
In
his distracted search for something he can’t quite name, Hig stumbles into a
discovery of a former nurse named Cima and her father, who are staking out a
hidden life in a box canyon. The trio struggles to re-create what interpersonal
interactions are supposed to consist of in a dearth of society, and Heller
struggles here to clearly convey the development of the relationship between
Hig and the father in particular. Not surprisingly, Hig and Cima begin to fall
for each other (though it turns out that epic cases of blue balls persist even
in a postapocalyptic world) in a fitting end-of-the-world romance.
“In the dark she radiated a soft light of
her own like waves breaking at night.”
“I felt lonelier then than I had felt before
the canyon. The hearts thudded and ricocheted against each other, but the
spirit did not. I could not stroke her more than absently, or kiss her, or even
talk with authenticity. As if failing in consummating love had robbed me of all
legitimacy as a lover. Had stripped my license to love or even express
affection. It was awful.”
“Funny how you can live a whole life waiting
and not know it.”
The
trio eventually comes to an agreement that they should seek out hope in a
broader world, though some readers may assume that Cima’s father would either
die or refuse to leave. After some struggles with math involved in ensuring
that Hig can take off in the plane given the weight involved and the runway
space, they agree to swing back around and pick up Cima’s father on the
highway. Miraculously (or not, considering a fiery plane crash would be an odd
editorial choice to end the story at that point), they make it by two feet in
the boxed-in takeoff.
Following
a harrowing takedown of a demented air-traffic controller, Hig and his new
friends endure an intense return to Hig’s airport, where they find a wounded
Bangley clinging to life after a series of hellacious attacks in Hig’s absence.
After things return to some semblance of normalcy, Cima seeks to find her
purpose through treating the Mennonites—especially the kids.
On a
side note, I felt the Mennonites represented a larger, more interesting aspect
of the tale than the space allotted to them dictated; as Heller pointed out,
they represented some aspect of society’s final clinging to discrimination: “The misperception that had saved their
lives ... Kept them away, all attackers, preserved their lives as it killed
them.”
During
interactions with the Mennonites, Hig’s love for Cima grows as he sees her in
her natural setting, pursuing her passion more in line with the natural
progression of things—caretaking, healing, treating.
“Watch anyone enter their arena of real
mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves.”
“As if part of her relaxed, as if there were
a shucking of some old skin. A husk of herself that had been a barrier I hadn’t
even been aware of. And in the sloughing off, she opened and flowered. Corny,
huh? Not really. Magical. I mean to watch a person let go of something and
flower.”
“Dog
Stars” ended rather abruptly in my view, with some vague potential promise of
Arabic rescue and wrapping up with a poem to end the novel. Of course, I
understood the move by Heller, as this story held potential for developing into
a really, really long book.
I
felt that Heller took advantage of an interesting tool in the writing of this
story—one that could be construed as either a conundrum or a convenient
literary license. Because it’s written in essentially an apocalypse context,
the author isn’t forced to delve too much into relationships, since there are no
rules, dividing lines, parameters, boundaries or, really, guiding principles. As
a result, we are not forced to consider whether it’s fair for Hig to abandon
Bangley without really telling him why.
Despite
some minor quibbles over certain aspects of the tale, I found this to be an
engrossing, emotional read, rife with monumental questions about humanity,
religion, morality, love and society. Heller takes on an ambitious environment with
aplomb, sketching out how what we might cling to, turn to and lean on in times
of unthinkable depravity and loss. In that sense, he has pulled off a minor
miracle in “The Dog Stars”—painting a believable picture of what an America
might look like after it goes to the dogs.
“Still, some nights I grieved. I grieved as
much at what I knew must be the fleeting nature of my present happiness as any
loss, any past. We lived on some edge, if we ever lived on a rolling plain ...
that sense of being in a painting.”
“Goodbye, bud. You are Jasper. My heart. We
are never apart, not here, not there.”
“Is it possible to love so desperately that
life is unbearable? I don’t mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate.
Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.”
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