The arrival of the latest book by Joe Hill has generally been seen as one of the highlights of the publishing year, and has been much anticipated here at SFFWorld.
Joe has said that The Fireman is his take on his father’s masterwork The Stand. I can see what he means, though the end-results are clearly different. Whereas The Stand begins with the spread of a killer flu germ (‘Captain Trips’), The Fireman begins with the dispersal of a 21st century equivalent – a spore named Dragonscale, of unknown origin, possibly weaponised, that has spread to the general public. The symptoms occur suddenly and are quite striking – a strange dark tattoo, interlaced with gold, appears on the body, often followed by spontaneous combustion of the person infected.
This can be quite startling, and this is evident from the first sentence of the novel: “Harper Grayson had seen lots of people burn on TV, everyone had, but the first person she saw burn for real was in the playground behind the school.”
The first part of the book introduces us to Harper Grayson, nurse at Concord Hospital, Boston. Most importantly, Harper is the focus around whom the book is set. Through her and around her we are told of and shown the apocalyptic conditions created as a consequence of the spread of Dragonscale, and the effects upon people. There are major exoduses, mass suicides and urban chaos as the spore spreads globally.
The book starts strongly, with the introduction of Harper and her husband Jakob. We’re into typical blockbuster-apocalypse mode, here, as we see the world collapsing around Harper and in the Boston area. There are glimpses of wider world events but the book works here in its smaller scale, matter-of-fact treatment of local health services struggling to deal with the crisis. Harper immediately becomes a likeable character that we can empathise with. Friendly, caring, sympathetic, as a nurse in a Boston hospital dealing with impossible circumstances, she pretty quickly becomes our heroine that we want to help sort things out.
Harper’s life is changed when she suddenly shows the signs of Dragonscale. Her husband, Jakob, promptly disowns her and becomes one of the key characters in hunting down and killing ‘the smokers’. Harper also finds that she has become pregnant, and has to escape from her isolated urban existence to the countryside.
Remember that scene in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 where the outcasts hide away in the country and memorise a book for the future? To me, the middle part of this book reads a little like that. Harper is brought by The Fireman to Camp Wyndham, a place where other refugees with Dragonscale are hiding from those determined to hunt down ‘the smokers’ and kill them before their disease spreads further. Here Harper has to deal with her burgeoning pregnancy and the growing paranoia of a frightened and increasingly threatened group. We meet Allie, tough-yet-fragile teenager, and her boyfriend Mike, who lead the Lookouts, a junior police force on camp. Elderly, matron-like Renee Gilmonton is one of the survivors from the Boston hospital. There’s Nick, Allie’s younger brother who is deaf. Kindly ‘Father’ Tom Storey is the leader of the group and his daughter Carol, who takes over the group when Father Storey is attacked and put into a coma. This has disastrous consequences, especially when Harper is accused of the attempted murder.
In Hill’s version, like Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, The Fireman is someone who starts fires. The reasons are, however, very different, as is the cause. Hill’s titular Fireman, though infected with Dragonscale, is able to control the spontaneous combustion and uses it, acting as a fiery form of justice to rescue others being hunted down by the Quarantine Patrols – as Harper was.
Much of this middle section is thus about character development. What Joe is good at is characterisation and in particular the character of Harper is particularly well done, as she tries to deal with a changing situation. They’re all as expected and have that certain style of character that is so typical of elder King – surprisingly adept for a relatively new writer.
It also has a lot to say of mob mentality and Humanity’s dark side, of how people act when under stress. The result isn’t always pretty.
However, this plot sounds much more interesting in precis than it really was. It was at this point that I began to struggle with the book, and lost interest with much of what was going on. By focusing on a small group of characters in an isolated place the book has focus but lacks a feeling of real progression and the bigger picture. There’s much to be said on human emotions, of fear, of friendship, of loyalty and of free speech, but at times this slows down the pace to such an extent that it rather reads of grandstanding rather than plot development.
Weirdly, this focus on such a limited cast means that when the story does try to show ‘the bigger picture’ the story became less ‘real’. (And there’s a bizarre report about a world-famous author that just seemed out of place.) In the same way I did feel that the bad guys are rather less well formed and fit the baddie stereotype rather too easily. They become something very easy to hate without any real depth to their personas. ‘The Marlboro Man’, as radio propagandist and key protagonist, is this book’s version of Randall Flagg but, unlike Flagg, comes over as all a bit ‘over-the-top’. Similarly, the recurring role of Jakob becomes increasingly more frenzied upon each recurrence and in the end for me his constant reappearance was overdone.
The last part of the novel is where our characters leave Wyndham to find respite and sanctuary, heading north to Martha Quinn Isle, a place where, according to the Internet, a cure is offered for Dragonscale. Unsurprisingly, they are chased and it all becomes a bit like Spielberg’s movie Duel. After a frantic battle at Camp Wyndham, which led to their departure, this part seems rather out of place. If the novel had finished at Wyndham I think I would’ve been happier. Because the book has focused on the small group of characters, when we move to a wider view it is rather disconcerting. I was reminded here of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or perhaps even the end of Joe’s dad’s novella, The Mist, when a wider picture is shown. It is disconcerting and doesn’t entirely work for me. Pleasingly, there is hope at the end, though the overall feeling is one of perpetual bleakness.
In summary, The Fireman is a book that I find extreme in terms of its highs and lows. When it is good, it is very good, but when it is not so good I struggled to keep going with it. It is a book that begins really well but suffers from being too long in the middle, with an extended coda at the end that goes on longer than it should, if it should happen at all. Having said this, The Fireman is definitely not a bad book. I enjoyed it, a lot, but in the end I have to say not as much as NOS4R2.
I’m sure that it will do very well, despite my reservations.
The Fireman by Joe Hill
Published by Gollancz (Review copy received), June 2016
602 pages
ISBN: 978-0575130715
Review by Mark Yon, April 2016
I actually took a break to read another book, and I stopped somewhere in the middle of the Camp Wyndham section. I hope I can pick it up again, because I do want to finish it.