‘Remains of what once was’
Krivak’s serene new offering is a kinder, gentler take on post-apocalyptic fiction
The Bear Andrew Krivak Bellevue
Most post-apocalyptic fiction takes place in a landscape poisoned by nuclear war or rendered savagely inhospitable by climate change. Andrew Krivak paints a gentler picture in his lyrical third novel, The Bear, which finds an unnamed father and daughter alone in a wilderness seemingly untouched by whatever catastrophe has rendered them the last two humans on Earth. They are embedded in the rhythms of the natural world, their activities organized by the seasons. The pair could belong to almost any period in pre-industrial human history were it not for the memories the man shares and the “remains of what once was” that he shows the girl on a fateful journey from their mountainside home toward the ocean, shortly after she turns 12.
The man’s stories recall a slowly dwindling clan; his father “knew only your mother’s family. And they spoke only of mothers and fathers to their kin.” That generation looked for other people “their whole lives,” the father says. “And when they were done looking, it was just me and your mother . ... So we didn’t look anymore.” Ruined building walls visible when the father was a boy are now covered by grass and weeds; glass for a window has been passed down through at least three generations, “so precious a thing had it become as the skill for making it was lost.” Krivak’s gorgeous descriptions suggest a world that has returned to its proper equilibrium and rightful inhabitants: the animals and trees whose voices the girl discovers she can hear.
“All living things spoke,” says the eponymous bear who rescues the girl when she suddenly finds herself alone and far from home. “It was the others like her who stopped listening,” Krivak writes, “perhaps the real question was how she could understand him.” The bear promises to accompany her home, but it grows too cold to travel safely, and once he finds a sheltering cave, the need to hibernate overwhelms him. She must hunt for food and make warmer clothing for herself, relying on the skills learned from her father. Krivak reminds us of the extraordinary knowledge and discipline those skills require in detailed accounts of tasks from making snowshoes to skinning a deer. Depicting the drama of her efforts to survive, The Bear demonstrates its kinship with such classic coming-of-age-inthe-wild tales as My Side of the Mountain.
The novel’s closing pages return to the terrain of myth. The girl, now an old woman, “spoke to all of the living things of the Earth.” She lives in complete harmony with nature, without any need for the relics of a dead civilization that once intrigued her. Stories about her are passed down by the animals, and when a young bear arrives at her home, dispatched to fulfil a promise, he feels “as though he had come to a place where the end and the beginning were the same.”
Krivak’s serene and contemplative novel invites us to consider a vision of time as circular, of existence as grand and eternal beyond the grasp of individuals — and of a world able to outlive human destructiveness.