Fire Weather (2023)
Why this one?
So, I’ve been neglecting non-fiction almost entirely since I started my Booker project back in 2020, and really wanted to remedy it without massively eating into my time for reading fiction. My solution, rather belated, is to start listening to non-fiction via audiobooks. Once I had that idea fixed, it was pretty easy to know where to go for my first dip into the category, which was to check out books that have won the Baillie Gifford Prize for “excellence in non-fiction writing.”. Formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, it has been awarded since 1999 to works written in English by authors from anywhere in the world. Previous winners have included Anthony Beevor (for Stalingrad), Jonathan Coe (for his biography of B. S. Johnson) and Phillippe Sands. Fire Weather took the most recent Prize, awarded in 2023.
It’s written by John Vaillant (1962- ; active 2005- ), who was born and raised in Massachussetts, USA, and has lived in Vancouver, Canada since 1998. He has dual US/Canadian citizenship and is the son of social scientist George Eman Vaillant. He is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic and The Atlantic, and has written four full-length non-fiction works to date. His debut, The Golden Spuce, was published in 2005 and won the Governer General's Prize. 2010's The Tiger (about a man-eating tiger incident that took place in Russia) won numerous awards and was translated into 16 languages, as well as apparently having film rights optioned by Brad Pitt's production company. In 2014 he was awarded a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in Non-fiction, one of the world's most valuable prizes for literature, and in 2015 published his third book, The Jaguar's Children.
The audiobook of Fire Weather that I listened to is read by Alan Carlson.
Thoughts, etc.
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (to give it its full title) centres on the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire. The fire ravaged the hub of Canada’s oil industry, in remote Alberta, destroying thousands of homes and buildings and driving 90,000 people to evacuate in a single afternoon. This story is told in depth, using extensive testimonies and analysis of contemporary sources from residents, journalists, oil workers and journalists to piece together an almost minute-by-minute narrative of the development of a fire of never-before-seen magnitude. Around this story, though, Vaillant includes lengthy digressions - some necessary and illuminating, others more tangential but always interesting. So alongside the story of a then-unprecedented wildfire we also get an extensive history of bitumen mining in Canada; stories of the days when fur, not oil, was the preferred trade in the area; musings on the ‘living’ nature of fire; comparisons to the conditions experience in the wartime bombing of Hamburg; and - towards the end - a potted history of scientific proofs for climate change and the inaction that has inevitably followed them.
The story of the day the fire hit Fort McMurray acts as a metaphor for the progress of human understanding of climate change. Vaillant makes frequent reference through his book to the Lucretius Problem, referring to the Roman philosopher’s argument that we cannot imagine a river bigger than the biggest river we have seen. In the story of Fort McMurray, we see officials and residents unable to contemplate the possibility that the fire could breach the city’s boundaries, let alone wreak the damage it eventually does, even as the visible evidence literally bears down upon them. The failure of the city to provide clear and timely advice regarding evacuation, or take preventative action that could have minimised the impact (if not prevented it entirely) is put down in large part to a failure of imagination: something like that could never happen. But then it does. In the section at the end of the book which details the many prophets of climate disaster over time, and government and industry’s repeated and continuing lack of meaningful response, we see a direct parallel: all the evidence points to disaster on an unprecedented scale, but business as usual continues in large part, again, because of a collective global failure of imagination. Of course, unlike the fire in Fort McMurray, there are also those who have known perfectly well what was to come but deliberately obstructed any response to it. The oil giants and their sponsors certainly don’t escape blame in Vaillant’s narrative.
It’s a startlingly bleak book and one that’s obviously very timely. It brings the climate crisis to life in vivid detail through the story of the Fort McMurray fire, and highlights both the historical factors that have led us to this very dark place in the history of our planet, and the urgency of a response: as we all know, since 2016 stories like this, of horrifying destruction wrought by our own addiction to oil, have only become more frequent, more widespread and more destructive to those caught in the middle of them. If there’s any criticism to be made, it’s that there’s a lack of memorable human characters: while there are glimpses of moments that are powerful at a human level, we don’t really get to know many of the book’s large cast of real people in the depth that would make us care about them individually. But then, in some senses this is inevitable: Vaillant’s main character undoubtedly here is fire. Anthopormorphised to terrifying effect, fire is a character on a whole other level, one that if left unchecked, will consume everything in its path - including us puny humans.
Score
9
A brilliant read - albeit a rather gloomy one to soundtrack my chilly walks and runs through a very grey January in the UK! I don’t have a huge recent benchmark for non-fiction but this is definitely highly recommended for its excellent storytelling and important subject matter.
Next up
TBC
