Living off the grid in Alaska in 1970s a tale for our times
‘The Great Alone’ is a compassionate and nuanced portrait of generational trauma
The political moment south of the border feels so unique, it’s easy to forget that it isn’t.
With a controversial president, a deeply polarized citizenry and alarming headlines about public violence flooding airwaves, 2018 is, in fact, reminiscent of the early ’70s.
Then, many disillusioned hippies dropped out of society and lived off-grid, just as many hipster millennials do today.
So the timing couldn’t be better for blockbuster author Kristin Hannah’s latest outing, “The Great Alone,” about young backto-the-landers who flee to a remote town in Alaska.
The novel, named for a Robert Service poem from 1907, opens in 1974. It follows Leni Allbright, a bookish 13-year-old whose Vietnam vet father is desperate to escape the horrors he experienced overseas.
After fighting an unpopular war, Ernt Allbright returns home to poor work prospects and a hostile public.
Dogged by nightmares and flashbacks, the former PoW takes his rage out on his wife, Cora, to whom he is bound by a sick passion.
As his mental health deteriorates, he keeps Cora and Leni close, perpetually moving the family from town to town, unable to hold down a job.
Until he inherits land in Kaneq, Ala., from a slain soldier, packs them all up in a VW van and heads north, to a moss-covered cabin with an outhouse and no electricity or running water.
What the family discovers when they arrive will be familiar to anyone who’s tested “the simple life” fantasy: treacherous wilderness and the back-breaking labour required to survive it. That, and the fact that one’s troubles tend to follow you wherever you go. (The book opens with a telling quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.”)
The fantasy of self-sufficiency — hunting and canning and growing one’s own vegetables — turns out to be a whole lot more brutal than anyone could have imagined. And isolation is not the cure Ernt hoped it would be.
As a result, Leni’s experience in Alaska is deeply conflicted. On the one hand, she finds a sense of belonging here, among the scrappy, tight-knit community of adventurers, including Large Marge, a lawyer-turned-homesteader who never goes anywhere without her gun.
Leni finds friendship, too, and later love, with a classmate, Matthew Walker, with whom she bonds. Plus, a lasting connection to Alaska’s vast, rugged terrain, with its jagged mountain peaks, frozen rivers and lakes, and technicolor vistas. She’s at home for the first time in her life.
And yet, the state’s punishing climate, ferocious wild animals, long, dark winters and precarious economy fuel Leni’s father’s downward spiral into alcoholism.
Transforming into a survivalist nut, Ernt wakes Leni in the middle of the night for gun-cleaning drills, and waits for her outside school, restricting her social life.
He guards his wife jealously, their every interaction infused with toxicity. The cabin soon feels like a prison, Leni’s own family more dangerous than any threat outside their door.
The awe-inspiring wilderness redeems this cloistered life, but cannot contain its violence.
Hannah, whose 2015 novel “The Nightingale” has been a fixture on bestseller lists, comes from a long line of adventurers. Her parents own a lodge in Sterling, Ala., on the Kenai River, and this landscape has clearly imprinted on her psyche. The descriptions here of the Last Frontier are spectacular, stirring and highly cinematic. (So much so, in fact, that Sony TriStar Pictures has just snapped up the movie rights.)
Add to that, Hannah, the author of more than 20 novels, is known for her complex portrayals of everyday women — and “The Great Alone” is no exception. This is a compassionate, nuanced portrait of the “twisted love” that results from domestic violence, and of the ways in which women cope with such abuse. A harrowing portrait of generational trauma, both personal and political, and what it takes to overcome it.