World Books Review: Fallout Girl

Another take on the post-apocalyptic novel proves that this venerable genre is anything but a wasteland.

Far North by Marcel Theroux, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25.00, 314 pages

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

“Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol the dingy city. I’ve been doing it so long that I’m shaped to it, like a hand that’s been carrying buckets in the cold.”

So begins author Marcel Theroux’s “Far North,” a novel of post-apocalypse set in Siberia. It’s an interesting geographic choice for this kind of story, as Siberia is one of the few places in the world that already looks as desolate and ravaged as a post-apocalyptic landscape. Theroux, who has both spent time on the Great Steppe, and also filmed a documentary on settlers who have chosen to move back to Chernobyl, does a remarkable job evoking the breath-freezing cold of that world, giving even the novel’s most implausible ideas the ring of truth.

In “Far North,” climate change, along with the attempts to delay climate change, has led to world war, which may or may not have resulted in the end of human civilization (it’s never made entirely clear what has happened to the world outside of Siberia). The protagonist of the novel, Makepeace, is the sole remaining citizen of the town of Evangeline. Early in the book, we learn that this noir-ish, hard-nosed character is not at all what we expect: “Killing always sits heavy with me,” Makepeace muses after taking the life of a violent thief, “Whether that’s because of my being a woman, or because my disposition is naturally softhearted for another reason, I don’t know.”

Far from seeming gimmicky, Makepeace’s gender lends a tension to Far North that most examples of the genre lack. Post-apocalyptic novels tend to center around a taciturn male unafraid of kicking some ass (“I Am Legend,” “The Road,” “Dhalgren”), or if the author does choose a woman for a protagonist, she is invariably described as a passive sufferer (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Unit”) or a maternal wise-woman (“The Stand”). I can’t think of another example of a character like Makepeace, who acts as any woman would if she wanted to survive in a post-apocalyptic world—in short, like a man.

Makepeace’s parents had moved to Siberia before the apocalypse, as part of a social movement aimed at escaping the twisted values and moral decadence of modern life. When survivors of the war arrived in Evangeline, they came into conflict with the settlers already living there. “It was like two different species colliding: the world that had a choice, and the world that had none. The strains between us were ratcheting up in secret. And even those who noticed it didn’t like to admit to it. The trouble lit slow, like one of those lazy damp leaf fires in autumn.”

When the story begins, Makepeace’s position as sheriff of Evangeline has become something of a sinecure, as she’s the only person still living there. So when a plane crashes right before her eyes, the time seems ripe for adventure. Makepeace leaves Evangeline behind and heads off in search of whatever new civilization has re-conquered the skies. What follows is a vaguely episodic account of her travels through the North. Everywhere she turns, Makepeace finds corruption and lawlessness. She is accused of being a spy, starved, beaten, and enslaved. And whenever you think things are about to take a turn for the better, they just get worse.

Author Marcel Theroux puts the world on ice.

For example, Makepeace spends several years working as a slave at a place called “the base”. After years of service, she is promoted and made a guard. Her responsibilities in this position including choosing prisoners to work in “The Zone”, a derelict city once known as Polyn, where the most advanced technologies of the old world were collected just before the apocalypse. Makepeace chooses her only two friends to do salvage work in Polyn, thinking it a favor, but it turns out that an anthrax attack during the war has made the place poisonous. All those who enter the city are killed afterwards, just to recover a few batteries or bits of circuitry.

Theroux posits that the wide distribution of knowledge and skills would prove the greatest impediment to rebuilding civilization after a worldwide catastrophe:

“We had been so prodigal with our race’s hard-won knowledge. All those tiny facts inched up from the dirt. The names of plants and metals, stones, animals, and birds; the motion of the planets and the waves. All of it fading to nothing, like the words of a vital message some fool had laundered with his pants and brought all garbled.”

Both the world and the characters of Far North are immaculately designed, so it’s a shame that the plot sometimes comes up short. A short love interest for Makepeace results in an unsatisfying coda to the primary action of the novel, and a tricky reveal in the final chapters seems similarly contrived. Theroux’s decision to make his protagonist a slave removes some of her agency, and slows down the middle of the book. That said, I felt a similar lack of action in Cormack McCarthy’s recent apocalyptic novel, “The Road,” and that book won the Pulitzer, so I suppose it’s not really much of a complaint.

In Makepeace, Theroux has given us a protagonist at once recognizeable and original, struggling to survive as a woman in a world that no longer has much need for the feminine. Her struggle finds a counterpart in the struggle of her world, a wounded creature itself on the brink of barrenness and death. In this way, Makepeace becomes a metaphor, both for the physical degradation of the planet, and the human impulse to survive. As she describes herself, “I thought that whatever hopes and convictions she had cherished, Makepeace was just another mask that life wore as it fought to renew itself, unsentimental, unsparing, fighting ugly.”