Books I Didn't Finish: Devolution
Max Brooks is back, baby!
Following the success of The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z and a book about how if you find yourself in a world of mines and crafting the most important thing you can craft is you, we now have Devolution, which is jumping on board the increasingly-hot bigfoot scene that’s inexplicably growing in America. Will it kick start a sasquatchenaissance in the same way that The Zombie Survival Guide helped to revive zombie mania in the early 2000s? Maybe, but it probably doesn’t deserve to.
Devolution employs the same fictional non-fiction approach that World War Z did, although with a much more low-key premise. Set sometime in the very near future following a catastrophic eruption of Mount Rainier, the book is presented as the work of crack journalist Fictional Max Brooks, who decided to look into the destruction of a small rural settlement after getting a tip from one of the missing residents' brothers.
Said settlement is Greenloop, a small six-home experiment in high-tech environmentalism created as part of growing international attempts to tackle the climate crisis. Greenloop was found completely destroyed following the eruption, but not because of the volcano--Mount Rainier’s eruption cut it off from the outside world, but didn’t touch the immediate area itself. Something else laid waste to the town, something that the government seems to be making quiet efforts to cover up.
That’s right: a population of bigfoots (bigfeet?), forced out of their natural habitat by the eruption. The recovered diary of Kate Holland relays the story of Greenloop’s isolation, its residents’ spiral into paranoia and desperation, and the arrival of the bigfoot clan and the bloody battle for survival that ensued, interspersed with snippets of news articles and Fictional Max Brooks’ present-day investigations.
If that synopsis sounds entertainingly stupid to a degree rarely seen in the annals of published fiction then you’ll understand why I was positively giddy with excitement to get my hands on this book. Unfortunately, it mostly only lived up to the “stupid” part.
In terms of mechanics and style, Devolution is basically one of the chapters from World War Z blown up to full novel length. If you read my WWZ posts you’ll know why that’s an issue: many of those short narratives weren’t particularly well-written, relying as they did on cartoonish stereotypes and usually not rendered in anything close to the natural speech they’re meant to be transcribing, and those flaws are just as present here, if not more so.
Kate’s diary entries aren’t written anything like real diary entries--they contain long verbatim reproductions of conversations, for one thing--and the present-day interviews with Fictional Max Brooks have all the same problems that the interviews in WWZ did. If you strip away the thin veneer of diagetisism you’re left with a standard traditional prose novel that just isn’t particularly well crafted or well written.
Things get off to a bad start with our introduction to Greenloop, which goes into a lot of exposition on how the settlement functions while introducing eleven separate characters, including Kate and her husband, plus Kate’s brother and his estranged husband whose house she’s borrowing, plus Kate’s therapist who the diary entries are being written for. This is a lot of heavy lifting for the opening chapters of a novel to attempt, and Devolution doesn’t pull it off. Two of the Greenloop residents--a married couple with no heavy-handed quirks or outstanding traits--have no real personality to speak of and seem to vanish whenever the book forgets about them. I spent a lot of time in the first few chapters flipping back and forth between pages trying to keep all of the names straight, which isn’t a very good way to start off a novel.
Once you get to know the characters, things only get worse. One of my principal complaints with WWZ is that its air of verisimilitude is undermined by most of the interview subjects being cartoonish stereotypes; the same is true of Devolution’s Greenloop residents, but whereas Brooks ranged across the world and the political spectrum for WWZ’s satire, Devolution has its sights set firmly on American liberals. This started to become apparent around the time it introduces a married lesbian couple who--I swear I’m not making this up--have adopted an orphaned Rohingya girl who they renamed Palamino (but don’t worry, they’re going to let her pick her own name when she’s older) and whose PTSD they angrily berate the other residents for triggering.
At which point I said “Okay, sure, I see what you’re doing here. Where are you going with this?” Not anywhere too interesting, as it turns out.
The story is a pretty obvious metaphor for the environmental concerns that America and the rest of the world have been increasingly dealing with as the effects of climate change become more severe, and writing it seems to be Brooks’ way of laying out his thoughts on the issue. Greenloop is explicitly positioned by its creator as an experiment in solving the climate crisis without having to make any sacrifices in luxury or standards of living. The residents delude themselves into thinking they’re returning to nature, but in fact they’re living in a fragile bubble sustained by a system that collapses when Mount Rainier erupts. When the bigfeet show up, these upper class intellectuals are forced to reckon with a true return to the natural world in all of its ruthless violence.
Brooks is espousing a pessimistic outlook that’s not very far from my own, apparently concluding that Americans (and likely other residents of rich countries) aren’t going to be able to make the sacrifices necessary to stave off the coming climate apocalypse and won’t react well to being forced to do so. In the US just acknowledging that climate change is a problem and is caused by human action already puts you pretty far to the left of the country’s heavily skewed overton window; stating that solving it will require sacrifice and communal solutions instead of Capitalist Innovation™ is left enough that it’s beyond the comfort zone of most of the Democratic party. So why the liberal bashing?
While Brooks and I are on the same page as far as the environment goes, his exploration of these ideas is wrapped up in a decidedly conservative worldview, which made me re-assess much of WWZ.
The central theme of World War Z, when you get down to it, is “Gosh World War II was amazing, isn’t it a shame we haven’t had another one of those?” A big plot point that I didn’t get to in my Let’s Read is that the titular war isn’t actually necessary: the zombies will eventually decay on their own, so turtling up in geographical safe zones and waiting the crisis out is a viable strategy. But the American president convinces the world to launch a counter-attack against the zombies, based not on strategic concerns but a lot of vague platitudes about dignity. The idea that wars with no practical benefit can be justified on patriotic and moral grounds was a convenient one for an American writer to embrace in 2006, especially a writer with some apparent connection to the military (Brooks is currently a lecturer at West Point).
World War Z’s attitude to war is highly idealistic, engaging in the sort of heroic myth-making that the victorious nations of WWII did and viewing conflict and strife as character-building exercises. I think this is behind the book’s odd portrayal of Israel as the world capital of pragmatism and level-headedness; the idea seems to be that living in a region that’s experienced a lot of strife and conflict makes people hardy and practical-minded, whereas living in a country that hasn’t experienced war in the recent past--which isn’t actually true of America, but conservatives like to pretend it is--turns you into the space colonists from Wall-E.
(Although as a quick aside, maybe I’m not giving Brooks enough credit here: Israel was one of the first countries to enact travel restrictions during the opening stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when most other countries weren’t taking it seriously. Given that the virus started in China just like WWZ’s zombie apocalypse and that the initial outbreak was muddied by Chinese authorities trying to cover it up, this was all a slightly eerie echo of the events of World War Z. Someone go check on Mount Rainier just in case).
This notion gets aired again in Devolution in the form of Mostar, the only Greenloop resident who doesn’t flail around in a befuddled panic when the eruption occurs. The book attributes this pretty much entirely to the fact that she’s lived through warfare, being a survivor of (I’m guessing, based on the hints) the Bosnian war.
The thing is, I fundamentally agree with World War Z and Devolution on most of these themes. I do think that people in wealthy countries have become too attached to easy luxury and consumerism, and I’ve recently argued myself that the world is too dependent on a fragile global infrastructure that could easily fall in a major catastrophe of the kind that is definitely going to happen eventually. Where I part ways with the books is their apparent insistence that the solution to these problems is for individual people to become hardier, for the government to introduce mandatory military service or have a good war every generation or so (that’ll toughen up those weak-willed liberals, by God!).
And this is why I’m saying that these books reveal a fundamentally conservative worldview. Even more than the blatant militarism, it’s the idea that systemic problems should be solved not by systemic solutions but by individual people making personal lifestyle and attitude changes. The further right you go the more this philosophy is openly embraced, especially when it comes to climate change and other environmental problems.
By the way, the book’s near-future setting includes America invading Venezuela, which is a thing that doesn’t seem like it’s close to ever happening but which a lot of particularly sabre-rattling conservatives would like to happen.
But leaving the politics aside and focusing on Devolution purely as entertainment...well, there’s a reason I spent so long talking about themes: there’s not a whole lot to discuss. For a story about a volcanic eruption and bigfoot attacks, the book is just not very interesting. Kate Holland is an example of my least favourite character type, the ultra-passive, meek protagonist who spends the first half of the book being buffeted around by the events of the plot and failing to take an active role in moving the story forward. Like all characters of this type, it’s supposed to be cathartic and exciting when she finally starts doing something, and as always that point comes far too late to make up for how dull she is in the first half.
If Kate swooning like a 19th century maiden any time anything stressful happens doesn’t sound like gripping storytelling, then nothing else in the first half of the book will take up the slack. The book tries to conjure up a Lord Of The Flies scenario with the Greenloop residents dividing into factions and spiraling into paranoia, but this process is nonsensical. After the eruption, the Silicon Valley power couple who run the settlement are like “We should take absolutely no precautions whatsoever in case we’re trapped here long-term” and Mostar is like “Actually I think we should” and instead of just agreeing to disagree and going their separate ways, Mostar (and Kate and her husband, who she bullies into helping her) starts making preparations in secret behind everyone else’s back. The need for this secrecy is never really explained.
(To be fair, I didn’t finish the book and there are a lot of hints that the Greenloop founders are up to something shady and/or aren’t who they appear to be, but this shouldn’t factor into the other characters’ actions since they presumably don’t know what’s going on any more than we do).
And this is why I bailed out halfway through Devolution: all the Bigfoot attacks in the world can’t make up for a book this dull.
But wait! What’s that, coming through the woods? Is it...could it be…
Yes, it’s the legendary Bonus Review!
Bonus Review: Sasquatch Chronicles
My legions of loyal blog readers know that I’m an expert on many topics, including esoteric subjects like UFOs, ghosts and vaguely spooky bullshit that probably isn’t actually mysterious but what if it was though, what then? But I didn’t actually know a lot about the Bigfoot legend before starting this post, so I decided to do some research by turning to the most sobre, academic source of Bigfootery I could find.
Sasquatch Chronicles is a weekly podcast that’s been running since 2013 and has an astonishing 667 episodes as of this writing. I found out about it initially because they had Max Brooks on for an interview a few weeks ago, but that’s not what I was there for. The podcast's bread and butter is interviews with people who believe they’ve encountered Bigfoot-like entities; sometimes these are regular folks, sometimes they’re fellow “paranormal investigators” who write and publish on topics supernatural with varying degrees of commitment.
To my delight, I quickly discovered that the podcast’s hosts subscribe to the far end of the “high strangeness” interpretation of the Bigfoot phenomenon. Many paranormal researchers (insert scare quotes around future instances of that phrase) have noticed that claimed sightings and experiences of the supernatural tend to congregate together to a degree that doesn’t seem to be a coincidence: if you dig around areas experiencing UFO “flaps” you’ll find an uptick in hauntings and sightings of weird creatures and the like, for example. The explanations for this range from rifts in the fabric of reality betwixt which slip the denizens of the great outer darkness to some sort of unknown atmospheric or physical process that causes people to hallucinate more frequently. Personally I think that people who are primed to interpret things through a paranormal lens will do so across a wide range of experiences, and that spooky places (like, for example, deep forests) tend to attract a lot of different urban legends and tall tales.
This is all a preamble before I tell you that a lot of Bigfoot sightings are absolutely fucking bananas and include wild shit like UFOs, ghosts and mysterious fairy-like entities, or ascribe to Bigfoot abilities like teleportation or the ability to phase through solid matter. A sulphur-esque smell likened to rotting eggs that supposedly accompanies a wide range of other paranormal events--and, completely coincidentally I’m sure, some abnormal neurological states--is commonly reported (the rotting eggs part is also a feature of the less strange “this is a physical hominid and nothing more” sightings and is included in Devolution).
This is all fantastic of course, but I don’t want to give you the impression that Sasquatch Chronicles is an Alex Jones-esque stream of raving nonsense, because that’s not the case. The things the hosts and some of the guests believe are very odd, but they’re able to talk about those beliefs in a calm and lucid fashion and generally come across as people who sincerely believe in the things they claim to have experienced.
That said, the show often falls short of actual rationality or critical thinking: in just the handful of episodes I listened to the hosts discussed several proven hoaxes as though they were real, and no attempt is generally made to try to put forth a mundane explanation for the guest’s experiences (which often boil down to “something big moved around in the forest and it gave me the willies”).
Despite this, I found Sasquatch Chronicles oddly compelling and ended up throwing episodes on when I was out for a walk or playing a game on my iPad. Listening to spooky ghost stories is always fun, even if you don’t believe a word of them.