The Dog Stars

"What I think is super interesting about this book is that it came out in 2012; six years after Cormac McCarthy ’s The Road , which kind of re-defined and dominated the idea of the post-apocalyptic literary novel in the public imagination. This meant that novels in its wake, like The Dog Stars , were frequently talked about in comparison to The Road , like: ‘ The Road… but with hope.’ So while The Dog Stars had enormous success—it was picked for Oprah’s book club, and so on—a lot of people who love dystopian novels still seem not to have heard of this one. I’ve recommended it so many times. “Dystopias put you in a world where characters have to fight to survive. It makes all those structures of society that make life sanitised and safe suddenly disappear” The main character is called Hig, and he’s lost everyone and everything he knows apart from his dog, his Cessna plane, and his dour gun-toting neighbour. The thing which frustrates me about the idea of it being dubbed ‘ The Road… but with hope!’, is that that suggests a sentimentality of some kind, and this book is decidedly unsentimental. The narration is extraordinarily well done. Many post-apocalyptic books have a spareness and sparseness that can sometimes feel affected. This feels incredibly naturalistic, and yet manages to be very lyrical. One review I read talked about it having a haiku-like quality. It has these clipped sentences, in a way that feels hyper-realistic to how minds think. It’s effortlessly beautiful while being violent and harrowing. Another frustration I can feel is that, often, the books without hope are considered stronger or more literary or realer—as if the books with hope have somehow been airbrushed. But I think the latter are actually more realistic. Hope is not neat. It can be a dangerous thing, because we can hold onto hope long after we should, sometimes. Hope is a fundamentally human trait, which brings with it its own risks. To me, social realism must contain hope—and hope is not necessarily a form of soft-focus."