The 91av Book Club moved from a far-future space opera in July’s read, Claire North’s Slow Gods, to a much nearer future on Earth in our read for August. Peter Heller’s takes place after a flu pandemic has wiped out the majority of Earth’s population, and follows the story of Hig, a lonely pilot, his dog Jasper – and their somewhat problematic neighbour Bangley. If that pandemic-struck world sounds like Peter was riffing off the real events of 2020, he wasn’t: he wrote it well before covid, and (as he wrote in an essay for the book club) found it extremely eerie to find life imitating art, as the world shut down around us six years ago.
I have to start with an admission: I am a big Peter Heller fan. He was an adventure writer and journalist before turning to fiction, and I really enjoyed his thrillers The River and The Guide for their unique blend of gorgeous nature writing and heart-in-your-mouth survival. Somehow, I’d never got round to reading The Dog Stars, and when I discovered that it was about to be released as a film by Ridley Scott – and that it was a piece of post-apocalyptic fiction – I couldn’t wait to read it with our book club.
I wasn’t surprised to also love this novel. It combined all my favourite things: wilderness survival, a post-disaster world, lovely writing – and a Very Good Dog. I was fascinated to learn, in Peter’s essay, how he wrote the novel cold – no initial research, no planning: “It was as if Hig were on the other side of a campfire on an October night, with the wind blowing the flames around, telling me what had happened to him a few years before. I wrote in a white heat. I was constantly surprised, awed, devastated by what happened. I’d have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table.” In our interview, Peter also told me about how he decided on the nature of the apocalypse that would affect his world, and what it was like to see his characters appear on the big screen, courtesy of Scott – spoiler alert, there were tears.
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There was more of a mixed response to The Dog Stars from book club members. Karen Warren “found the first half a bit tedious, and probably wouldn’t have carried on if it hadn’t been a book club choice”. But ultimately she was glad she did, and “couldn’t put it down towards the end”. “I loved the way that there was hope even in a seemingly impossible environment,” she wrote on , describing the novel as “a testament to the triumph of the human spirit”.
The writing in this book is very distinctive – jumpy and disjointed, reflecting Hig’s state of mind. Readers entered into an interesting debate about the reason for this. “I read it as him losing some of his expressive power while living with Bangley: not much real conversation, not much novelty, a lot of silence and repetition,” wrote warsaw_sun. “There’s a suggestion of fever in his history, is that supposed to have affected his language, or is it just that ‘men of action’ try to cut the descriptions right down following Hemingway?” wondered Alan_P.
Overall, Alan was not a fan. “I’m sure a lot of people will enjoy the book – but for me the view of human nature is just too grim and not realistic,” he wrote. He compared The Dog Stars to Tim Winton’s Juice – another book club read that is also set post-apocalypse, this time a climate one. “What bothers me is how these stories naturalise the idea that the only way to survive is to become the very kind of armed, unchallengeable patriarch that helped create the violence in the first place,” he wrote. “As humans we do well when we cooperate and badly when we don’t. Perhaps I wouldn’t survive a holocaust, but I don’t think empathy is weakness, I don’t think that kindness is naivety, and I don’t want to read any more dystopias.”
For Kelly, The Dog Stars was “not so much an apocalypse story (the how and the why) but a people story”; for Barbara Howe, it was “as much an old-fashioned Western as it is science fiction, if not more so”. “As in, isolated men with guns defending their claim and their women against marauders.” Dee55, meanwhile, was left pondering the very nature of science fiction. “I’ve been meaning to ask other readers here – does anything set in the future automatically count as science fiction? Or does the epidemic make it science fiction because that’s not a known type?”
It’s a great question! For me, science fiction is a broad and generous church, ranging from the science-light writing of the likes of The Dog Stars or another book club read, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, to the hard sci-fi of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars and the space opera of Slow Gods. Next month, however, defining sci-fi isn’t something the book club will need to worry about…
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