(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
It’s a constant feature of end-of-the-world stories that there’s a sizeable reckoning for any of the protagonists involved in the story; it makes sense – the world is about to go the way of the Dodo, life in all its forms is vapourising into nothing and, unless you have a concrete heart and soul, and yeah, sadly some do, you’ll be wondering what you can do in response to such a finalistic event.
If it’s blockbuster-type story, then you’ll have a multiplicity of reckonings taking place but in TJ Klune’s beautiful new novella, We Burned So Bright, he takes us into the lives of just two very important people, husbands of forty years, Donald and Rodney who in the closing weeks of planet Earth, decide to jump in their rusty, shuddering RV for a road trip to Washington State to Maine to carry one last task.
The focus on just two people during such a massive world-ending event really works, similar to the way in Signs, the alien invasion horror film from M. Night Shyamalan, really brough home the full impact of such a terrorising moment in human history, and drives home about cataclysmic the end of the world would be.
It seems strange to think you need to drive that home, but these days we are awash in apocalypses of every kind from zombies to viruses to aliens that it’s easy to fail to feel the impact of how traumatic such an event would be.
Years of travel, years of doing what needed to be done. And now, at last, the trip they’d been putting off because that made the distance real, something they’d long avoided. They had no other choice.
By zeroing in on just two people, who love each other and jointly have to find resolution to a moment of great past trauma in their life (even if no one but them will care), Klune gives We Burned So Bright an emotional resonance so impactful and substantial that you ache with impending sadness all the way through.
The story really hits home.
But rather remarkably for a novella in which a rogue blackhole is racing through the solar system, consuming everything in its path, there are many significant moments of real joy and hope throughout We Burned So Bright.
While there are the requisite bad faith actors (although with news of the black hole a year old, they have mostly done their destructive thing; mostly – there are truly dark if sorrowful scenes even so), they are few and far between, with the story focusing on either those who actively pretending the world won’t end and that miraculous salvation will come their way, or, and amazingly, these people are in the majority, those who simply want to live their best life before there is no more life to live.
So while Don and Rodney grapple with and argue gently (though sometimes not) about the final task they will ever carry out, clinging to the love they have for each other to see through the placing of the final piece of a lingeringly traumatic puzzle, there are quite a few transcendent moments that speak about how beautiful people can be, even in the face of impending death.
But these moments speak to something even deeper.
Humanity has often displayed a deep and enduring resilience for facing up to adversity, even often in the face of certain doom, which is the mark of a species that refuses to give in even when the odds and manifestly and completely stacked against it, and which has no doubt been instrumental in us climbing to the supposed top of the evolutionary ladder.
There’s no advantage to be had here, of course, since its epic disadvantage all the way, but even so, We Burned So Bright is full of truly human moments where a couple decide to get married even though their union will be very short lived, or people cook up great food and swim naked in chilly waters in an act of rare and moving community.
Most apocalyptic tales tend to err on the side of humanity going 100% self-preservingly monstrous without exception, but We Burned So Bright goes a different route choosing to believe that once the initial panic is over, that those remaining would chose the better final angels of our nature.
It astounds Donald and Rodney who are expecting the worst, to see the very best play out most of the time, and while there are some tense and harrowing scenes, for the most part, people join together in a shared sense of grievous fate and choose what they have in common in the best of ways rather than allowing the very worst to divide and destroy them.
Don paused, turning inward. He hadn’t noticed it before when he’d stepped out of the truck, too distracted by the ball lightning. Rodney was right: he did feel lighter. Not as it the weight of all of life had suddenly been lifted from his shoulders, but something close to it. For a moment, he felt younger than he had in years, all the earthly aches and pains seemingly melting away.
‘Strange,’ Don murmured.
At the heart of a story which should be harrowingly sad, and honestly it is in many ways that matter, sits a very hopefully if pain-streaked and intimately emotional mission by Donald and Rodney.
In the face of horrifically catastrophic odds that would make anybody question why fulfilling any last anything matters at all, their need to pay fulfill their final obligation to someone they dearly loved stands out as a bastion of true love and commitment.
You would think that with a world-ending blackhole bearing down on them that they’d bunker down just to live out their final days in self-serving indulgence, but they don’t, their need to go out in a meaningful way overtaking all other considerations to a truly moving extent.
Even more beautiful, and a love letter to the human condition which justifiably comes in for a lot of criticism, is the fact that most of the people they encounter, including some who actively help them to their own cost, understand implicitly why they are doing this.
As the last days of planet Earth and the human beckon, all of the petty stuff that gums up peoples’ lives, hardens their hearts and distorts perspectives is stripped right away, and all that remains in what matters, even in the normal course of things (they we are often too busy to see it).
We Burned So Bright is a surprising joy, weighed down by an apocalyptic and immutable end, yes, but full to the brim with love, real connection, deep meaning and a raw, affecting humanity that makes you realise that for all the evil in the world, there is some real potent good, especially at the end of the world where by rights it should no longer matter at all but very much still does.