Canadian Writers Abroad

While this summer’s wildfires are fresh on your mind, you are not about to read a review of them. Rather, Wayne Grady is reviewing John Vaillant’s book about the Fort McMurray fire: Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, Penguin Random House Canada, 2023. But Alberta is not abroad, you rightly say. Grady lives half the year in Mexico, where he met John Vaillant, at the literary festival in San Miguel de Allende. Vaillant lived in Mexico while working on a novel. Thus we have part Review, and part Out and About with two Canadians abroad.

Fire Weather by John Vaillant; Reviewed by Wayne Grady

In May 2016, one of the largest wildfires in Canadian history consumed almost all of the town of Fort McMurray, Alberta. As Canadian writer John Vaillant points out in his account of that fire – Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World – Fort McMurray exists in order to supply the world with fossil fuels: 40 percent of oil imports to the U.S. come from the tar sands upon which Fort McMurray is built. Tar sands are flammable. As Vaillant makes clear in his book, the irony was too great to pass up.

Vaillant was born in Massachusetts, and moved to British Columbia before writing his first book, The Golden Spruce, in 2005, about the cutting down of a tree sacred to the Haida. In an interview, Vaillant said he saw Grant Hadwin, the eco-warrior who felled the tree to protest BC’s forestry industry, as symbolic of our “human, collective struggle to reconcile our appetites and ambition with our need to derive our sustenance, if not wealth, from the planet.” In other words, we tend to destroy the world we love in order to continue living on it. His second book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, recounts how a rare Amur tiger exacted revenge on the hunters who had been preying on tigers in the Primorsky Krai region of Eastern Russia.

Fire Weather embraces both those themes. Fort McMurray is in the heart of Canada’s boreal forest, one of the last remaining old-growth forests on Earth; extracting fossil fuels from the ground beneath it is responsible for the global warming that is threatening to burn it down. Only instead of a mad eco-terrorist, or a tiger bent on revenge, we have Fire. Fire Weather reads like a biography of Fire. We are living, Vaillant writes, in what he calls “the Petrocene,” the age of oil: 84 percent of the world’s economy is powered by fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are converted to energy by fire. “When you consider how many fires we have around us all the time,” he says, “from turning on a stove to the combustion in our car engines, we make tens of trillions of fires every day. We could say that we are the servants of fire. It’s as though fire were alive and directing us to change the planet in ways that favours fire more than it favours us.”

Early in the book, Vaillant pursues the notion that fire is like a living thing. Fire grows, it travels, it seeks food. It breathes oxygen. And, he says, it hunts. His description of the Fort McMurray Fire closing in on the town, consuming outlying suburbs first, sneaking along side streets to get to the town’s heart, is reminiscent of a wildcat stalking its prey – it might be a scene from The Tiger.

Fire also reproduces itself. It was both coincidental and weirdly appropriate that Fire Weather was published in 2023, the worst year for fires in recorded history. According to the European Space Agency, the number of fires burning on the planet soared from around 1,000 in 2016 to 19,000 in 2023. That year, Fort McMurray was, in Vaillant’s words, “as conducive to fire as is possible anywhere on Earth.”

As of September 6 of this year, there were 639 active wildfires burning in Canada, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. So far this year, a total of 5,173 wildfires have consumed 8.8 million hectares of Canadian wilderness. The underlying message of Fire Weather is that our hubris, exemplified by global warming, has taken the physical form of fire, and is coming to get us.

Fire Season received a mittful of awards and was named a best book of 2023 by a dozen publications, among them the New York Times, the Globe & Mail, Time magazine, and the Washington Post. At the San Miguel festival, Vaillant shared a disturbing truth with his audience: the Fort McMurray fire “melted cars, turned entire neighbourhoods into fire bombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon.” And we can’t even think of that as the new normal: there’s no such thing as the new normal. “Every day will be different,” he says, “every year will be hotter. We are going to have to adapt to what I call climate incognita.”

“I’ve always felt like an outsider,” Vaillant told me in February, when he was attending the San Miguel Writers’ Conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. “I think it helps with my writing. I notice things that others might not see. I’m constantly questioning my surroundings.” When working on Fire Weather, his outsider status allowed him to question how it was that so many people – firefighters, radio and television crews, government agents – saw the fire coming towards them, and yet stayed in Fort McMurray until the last possible minute before taking the only road out of town, a road that was already engulfed in flames. “They were like deer staring into the headlights of an oncoming car,” he said. “No one could explain it. They were like we all are with global warming; we see it coming, we know it’s going to consume us, and yet we do nothing to avert it.”

Fire Weather is so well written it reads like a novel. “One reason the trees never get very big or very old [in the boreal forest]” he writes early in the book, foreshadowing what is to come, “is because, in spite of all that water, they burn down on a regular basis. They’re designed to. In this way, the circumboreal is truly a phoenix among ecosystems: literally reborn in fire, it must incinerate in order to regenerate, and it does so, in its random patchwork fashion, every fifty to a hundred years.”

The story builds as in a novel we can’t put down, even though we know how it’s going to end.

Further

• San Miguel Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival
• Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC)
• John Vaillant bio at the Lyceum Agency
• Fire Weather awards: Finalist, Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, 2023; Finalist, PEN/Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, 2024; John Wesley Dafoe Book Prize, 2024; B.C. Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, 2024
• Vaillant’s book, The Golden Spruce, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2005.
• “You have to hand it to Wayne Grady. When he steps outside his comfort zone, he makes it a giant step. In the midst of a distinguished career as a non-fiction writer and translator—14 books, 15 translations from the French (including works by Antonine Maillet, Yves Beauchemin and Daniel Poliquin), three Governor General’s Award nominations and one win (for Maillet’s On the Eighth Day)—he has produced his first novel.” Check out Jack Kirchhoff’s 2013 review of Grady’s prize-winning Emancipation Day (Doubleday) in the Literary Review of Canada (October 2013). He went on to publish more novels: Up From Freedom (2018) and The Good Father (2021), both by Doubleday Canada at Penguin Random House.

Header photo: Landscape view of wildfire near Highway 63 in south Fort McMurray; DarrenRD, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.