Josephine Schell thinks I’m going too far. She’s all about ecosystems and caloric needs, and maybe she’s right. But maybe there was also some latent gene that woke up in those creatures when they stumbled across Greenloop and found themselves facing a herd of cornered, isolated Homo sapiens. Maybe some instinct told them it was time to swap evolution for devolution, reach back to who they were to reclaim what was theirs.
I liked Max Brooks’ World War Z way more than I expected to — the “oral history” format, the examination of how different people behave under stress, the credible details of political/military/community responses to a global threat — and the fact that it was about “zombies” was beside the point. Brooks attempts that same kind of alchemy with Devolution — with a “found” eyewitness diary interspersed with research and interviews, details focussing on a diverse group of people under pressure, commentary on the failure of government systems in the wake of natural disasters — and the fact that it is about “Bigfoot” is (mostly) beside the point. Devolution is a compelling, cinematic horror story — with just enough quotes by the likes of Jane Goodall, Teddy Roosevelt, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to ground it in reality — but I didn’t find it as philosophically engaging as Brooks’ former novel (but I do think it will make a better movie). I’d give it 3.5 stars and am rounding down in order to rank Brooks against himself.
I wish we had more time. If just to practice with the javelins. No chance now. I probably shouldn’t have wasted all this time writing. But just in case something happens to me, I wanted there to be a record. I want someone, anyone who reads this, to know what happened.
The hoots are getting louder now.
In an introduction, our unnamed narrator explains how a diary (found and digitised by Senior Ranger Josephine Schell) was sent to him by its author’s brother. The diarist, Kate Holland, had become a recent resident, along with her husband Dan, of the “isolated, high-end, high-tech eco-community of Greenloop”; and after the community was physically untouched, but became totally isolated by, the eruption of nearby Mount Rainier, the diary goes on to recount Greenloop’s encounter with the ravenous Sasquatches who had been displaced from their mountaintop habitat. The format of Devolution frames this “firsthand account” between snippets of the interviews that the author conducts with both Josephine Schell (who is investigating the Greenloop site after the fact) and Kate’s brother (who is still looking for her, thirteen months later). I didn’t love this format — maybe because the diary was, by design, too focussed on the experience of one person; a newcomer who didn’t really know the others — and for an adventure tale, there was a definite lack of immediacy when everything is reported after the fact, by someone who obviously survived the events she writes about.
On the other hand, this story of rich, citified, back-to-earthers who are forced to face their own shortcomings when their high-tech fails is a fitting cautionary tale for our times:
Those poor bastards didn’t want a rural life. They expected an urban life in a rural setting. They tried to adapt their environment instead of adapting to it. And I really can sympathize. Who doesn’t want to break from the herd? I get why you’d want to keep the comforts of city life while leaving the city behind. Crowds, crime, filth, noise. Even in the burbs. So many rules, neighbors all up in your business. It’s kind of a catch-22, especially in the United States, a society that values freedom, when society, by nature, forces you to compromise that freedom. I get how the hyper-connectivity of Greenloop gave the illusion of zero compromise.
But that's all it was, an illusion.
Greenloop was founded by an ecomessiah — a charismatic high tech entrepreneur who brags that self-sufficiency means that their community generates all the power, heat, and water it could need but also has no mechanics, doctors, or more than a week’s worth of food because all of that is a phone call/drone delivery away — and the people who followed him into the woods are primarily highly educated older folks who believe that nothing in nature wants to hurt them. When the eruption destroys Greenloop’s buried communication cable and the only road out, most of the residents believe that government systems will kick in and rescue them — until the news they hear on their car radios inform them that the outer community is in chaos. Some residents will continue to live in denial, some will start to prepare for the long haul...and then the hungry Sasquatch attack.
I think the human mind isn’t comfortable with mysteries. We’re always looking for answers to the unexplained. And if an answer can’t come from facts, we’ll try to cobble one together from old stories. If we’ve heard about UFOs when we happen to see a light in the sky, or a Scottish lake monster when we happen to see a ripple in the water, or a giant, apelike creature when we see a dark mass moving among the branches...
While Devolution is an examination of how we in the West have become so disconnected from nature as to have become helpless in it (further infantilised by being too trusting of high tech and government to save us), it is important to the themes that it’s a tribe of Bigfoot that confront the community. Once the residents are forced to accept just what these hooting, reeking creatures in the woods really are, their first instinct is to befriend them; Greenloop was founded on Rousseau's beliefs that man (and the man-like, I suppose) is naturally peaceful in a state of nature. But supported by fieldnotes from primatologists like Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, we learn that our closest primate cousins are capable of ecstatic blood lust while hunting, and that’s the horrifying state of the creatures hunting the people of Greenloop. And while the title “Devolution” seems to refer to the Bigfoot (as in the opening quote), as the protections of civilisation are stripped away from the human combatants, they experience a sort of Lord of the Flies devolution themselves and are not above a certain amount of hooting, reeking blood lust themselves. This is more cinematic than thought-provoking, but it made for a propulsive read and I'm pleased to have picked it up.
