Above the Fire review
Check out Matt’s review of Above the Fire by Michael O’Donnell.
After his wife passes away, Doug takes his seven year old son Tim to hike New Hampshire’s White Mountains, with the hopes of assuaging their mournful situation and of strengthening the bond between father and son. During their retreat, news of a fire of unknown origin and social upheaval reaches the heights of the Granite State. Soon, nearly every hiker on the trail rushes down the mountain to ensure the safety of their loved ones, where they may be. Anticipating the danger in descending into the midst of uncertainty and purported chaos, Doug opts to shelter Tim and himself in a cabin, keeping far away from civilization, at least until the catastrophe blows over – if it ever does.
While O’Donnell worked in some poignant scenes that touch on fatherhood – dealing with a child’s inquisitive mind, what a father must teach his son – as well as prolonged isolation in the wilderness (not unlike Into the Wild), I feel that, given these subjects and themes, this novel could (and should) have had more depth. What mitigated its potential was the author’s reliance on excessive narration and description. He tended to gloss over events, rattle off details, and summarize the characters’ conversations, thoughts, and actions, which became tangential, tedious, and disengaging. The dialogue, on the other hand, was sparse and brief; we rarely get to see Doug’s and Tim’s personalities because the author is busy talking about the characters instead of showing them. But perhaps this approach is a means of conveying the experience of isolation – excessive introspection, wild thoughts, unexpressed anxieties – all which prove to be unhealthy in the long run when we keep them to ourselves, or when we have no one else with which to share them. In this way, it seems that O’Donnell was attempting to reflect this tendency for people to refrain from speaking to others and communicating ideas.
Another point was the story’s indefinite conflict. The reader never quite learns what the problem really was, or what caused it. The story ends just as our protagonists are returning to civilization (now apparently somewhat normal), so the threat remained only a potential risk – vague, tenuous – and never became an actual obstacle for the characters – unlike the characters in The Road, who found themselves in the midst of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world. It seems that the catastrophe’s function here was just to serve as a reason for Doug and Tim to live in isolation. Alternatively, the story might just as well have taken place in the same setting – minus the unnamed, distant disaster – where the characters face more likely and immediate dangers – renegade hikers, predatory animals, an unusually severe New England winter. Also, O’Donnell tried to generate conflicts between characters, but failed to develop these more fully, and so the conflicts and characters fell flat.
