Review of The Dog Stars by Peter Heller.
When I first pulled Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars from the
shelves of a bookstore I remember muttering a sarcastic “yeah right,” after I
read a comment on its cover claiming it was “A novel about the end of the world
which makes you glad to be alive.” That’s not the role of apocalyptic fiction,
I thought. But after reading the novel’s blurb, I decided to give it a go.
The story is set in a post-apocalyptic America, a decade after a virus has killed 99% of the population. Hig, a poet, handyman, gardener, fisherman, hunter and pilot along with his dog Jasper, share a small airfield with a Bangley, a gun-toting survivalist. They have nothing in common but need each other to survive. Hig uses his Cessna to make daily surveillance flights searching for marauding survivors, while Bangley uses his guns to kill them. All other survivors are deemed threats because Hig and Bangley both know what they had to do to survive.
So at the beginning of the book they are hard characters to like. But as the book progresses, and other survivors attack them, it becomes clear that their ruthless defence of the airfield is the only reason they have survived. Hig, Bangley and Jasper seemed destined to live out their lives together after successfully killing anyone who comes near. But then things change.
I found the story engrossing, but the authors writing continually interrupted the flow of the story. In particular his decision not to use quote marks to specify dialogue and not to use attributions annoyed me. I often had to re-read a passage to discover who, if anyone, had been speaking.
Peter Carey did the same thing in The True History of the Kelly Gang. But he is a much better writer than Peter Heller, as I never found myself asking if someone had just spoken. Carey also had a reason for his lack of dialogue signifiers as he was trying to emulate the absence of punctuation in a the Jerilderie letter, a letter dictated by Ned Kelly to Joe Bryne. I wonder why Peter Heller chose to forgo dialogue signifiers. It certainly did not add to the writing.
Another quirk with Heller’s writing is that he often had the same word twice in a row, for example: “They had seen enough, enough to flee, but not the full demise.” “Before before” was quite common.
By the end of The Dog Stars, the book had lived up to its front cover comment and instilled some hope for humanity into me. It is just a shame that Heller’s writing style damaged the flow of the story. It turned what could have been a really excellent novel, into one that is just good.
The story is set in a post-apocalyptic America, a decade after a virus has killed 99% of the population. Hig, a poet, handyman, gardener, fisherman, hunter and pilot along with his dog Jasper, share a small airfield with a Bangley, a gun-toting survivalist. They have nothing in common but need each other to survive. Hig uses his Cessna to make daily surveillance flights searching for marauding survivors, while Bangley uses his guns to kill them. All other survivors are deemed threats because Hig and Bangley both know what they had to do to survive.
So at the beginning of the book they are hard characters to like. But as the book progresses, and other survivors attack them, it becomes clear that their ruthless defence of the airfield is the only reason they have survived. Hig, Bangley and Jasper seemed destined to live out their lives together after successfully killing anyone who comes near. But then things change.
I found the story engrossing, but the authors writing continually interrupted the flow of the story. In particular his decision not to use quote marks to specify dialogue and not to use attributions annoyed me. I often had to re-read a passage to discover who, if anyone, had been speaking.
Peter Carey did the same thing in The True History of the Kelly Gang. But he is a much better writer than Peter Heller, as I never found myself asking if someone had just spoken. Carey also had a reason for his lack of dialogue signifiers as he was trying to emulate the absence of punctuation in a the Jerilderie letter, a letter dictated by Ned Kelly to Joe Bryne. I wonder why Peter Heller chose to forgo dialogue signifiers. It certainly did not add to the writing.
Another quirk with Heller’s writing is that he often had the same word twice in a row, for example: “They had seen enough, enough to flee, but not the full demise.” “Before before” was quite common.
By the end of The Dog Stars, the book had lived up to its front cover comment and instilled some hope for humanity into me. It is just a shame that Heller’s writing style damaged the flow of the story. It turned what could have been a really excellent novel, into one that is just good.
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