Days of disaster
Apocalypse is all the rage in literary fiction these days. Writers such as Emily St. John Mandel (“Station Eleven”), Claire Vaye Watkins (“Gold Fame Citrus”) and Edan Lepucki (“California”) engineer widespread disasters out of viral plagues, rampant drought and undefined chaos. Rather than providing generic thrills and plot twists, they employ their disaster scenarios to contemplate the human heart in times of crushing physical and mental crisis.
It’s especially hard to build a doomsday that feels both urgent and mysterious. Greg Hrbek accomplishes that tricky feat in his new novel, “Not on Fire, But Burning,” juggling what might have happened with what still could be.
The novel opens in San Francisco, as 19-year-old babysitter Skyler Wakefield looks out her window toward the Marin Headlands and witnesses an event of which she cannot make sense. She sees a bright light, “like something cosmic come at high speed through the atmosphere, a star falling in broad daylight, but now decelerating strangely, like a machine, as if to land in the water of the bay.”
Seconds later, the suspension cables of the Golden Gate Bridge are severed, Skyler’s 5-year-old charge is blinded by the blast, and a plume of radioactive precipitation forms to inundate the streets of San Francisco.
After that arresting opening, the narrative jumps eight years and to the opposite coast, where 11-year-old Dorian Wakefield dreams of his older sister Skyler. No one else in the Wakefield family remembers her, though; Dorian’s father, mother and older brother insist that such a person never existed. The boy finds their insistence maddening, but having recently been caught scrawling obscenities in the restroom of a local mosque, he has other problems to deal with.
Dorian’s life is further complicated by the arrival of Karim, an orphan from “the Territories,” where, in the wake of the still-unexplained San Francisco incident, he and fellow Muslims have been sequestered on former Indian reservations. Adopted by William Banfelder, one of the Wakefields’ neighbors, Karim has, unbeknownst to everyone in his new social circle, been trained as a suicide bomber and now awaits his ultimate assignment. After an awkward pool party at Banfelder’s house takes a disastrous turn for both Karim and Dorian, the boys begin to make decisions that move them steadily toward far-reaching and possibly catastrophic consequences.
“Not on Fire, But Burning” is not precisely a thriller, not exactly a science fiction novel. Like the enigmatic light that burns without catching fire, the book straddles genres as a kind of quantum coming-ofage novel, its course impossible to predict. Even as Dorian’s belief in the existence of Skyler begins to impinge on the consciousnesses of his parents and sibling, the outcome of their acknowledgment recedes into uncertainty as their immediate circumstances shift.
Hrbek, author of “The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly,” does a masterful job of bringing Dorian’s and Karim’s inner lives into high relief. Both teens struggle with the hatred and xenophobia inside themselves, even as they want to please, or at least placate, the adults around them. It’s hard for them to empathize, but eventually the realization of their similarities breaks through to Dorian, even as he hangs up on Karim in the middle of an apology. Dorian narrates, “We were to admit our wrongs, we children: from whom loved ones, futures, entire worlds had been stolen without apology. Somewhere deep inside, I was thinking: Why should either one of us be sorry.”
In that scene, Hrbek gets to the crux of Dorian’s unspoken kinship with Karim, the feeling that they’ve both been cheated by history and fate.
What is slightly disconcerting about the novel is that, while Hrbek emphatically sets the story in 2038, he doesn’t upgrade the technology used by his characters. Smartphones and tablets seem about as intelligent as they do today. There’s no need for hoverboards or even driverless cars, but a greater sense of distance from the present day might have added another welcome layer of strangeness. However, the novel operates in an alternate world already, so perhaps the need for futuristic extrapolation can be relaxed a bit.
In any case, that’s a quibble about a strong, suspenseful novel, rich in its language, clear eyed in its characters and propulsive in its plotting. Full of ambiguity, yet precise in its construction, “Not on Fire, But Burning” is a shining example of post-9/11, pre-next-disaster storytelling.