How literature about fire might help readers find hope within the ashes

“We live apocalyptically.”

The philosopher Bruno Latour said these words in a discussion interview the 2018 California wildfires.

His comments ring even truer in 2025, as Los Angeles area residents grapple with the horror and despair of deadly wildfires Thousands of homes and businesses and have no less than 25 people died.

From coast to coast, from hemisphere to hemisphere, one-off environmental disasters at the moment are commonplace. Large fires occur outside of the season, the fires burn hotter and spread further ever before.

Latour called it “life in the end times”; He points to the necessity to search out alternative routes of living, as extreme events that were once only the topic of dystopian movies simply change into a component of on a regular basis life.

My work focuses on writers' emotional responses to fires shows that literature and reading play a crucial role.

Works about fire often emphasize recovery and determination, but additionally provide space for processing complex emotions. If, as Latour fears, these are “end times,” literature might help readers learn tips on how to survive, cope, and keep hope alive.

A standard enemy

With the pace and tone of a thriller, George R StewartHis 1948 novel “Fire” is a few forest fire in California from its inception to its extinguishment a number of days later.

Stewart's biographer Donald M. Scott, described “fire” as “the first novel about fire ecology,” and the environmental impacts of fires are actually a crucial a part of the work. But “Fire” can also be a novel that deals intensively with the query of how people come together within the face of catastrophe.

Stewart was so concerned with creating a practical depiction of a burning forest that he visited fires with a forest ranger as a part of his research for the book. His burning scenes are graphic and take care of the sensible features of firefighting and the human costs involved.

But the novel also celebrates kinship because the characters form deep bonds as they work together to contain the fireplace. This sense of shared experience is crucial.

One of the story's central characters, veteran forester Bart Bartley, imagines fire as an enemy, “evil, malevolent and scheming.” Fire historians Tom Griffiths and Christine HansenThose who’ve worked with fire-affected communities corroborate Bartley's account, noting how fire “makes victims feel like they are being hunted and toying with the survivors.”

But within the struggle with this “evil” force, Bartley feels “great human love” for many who work with him.

Renewal and regrowth

Stewart's work can also be notable for its give attention to renewal.

After the flames are defeated, the novel's narrator surveys the damage. First he sees a landscape that has been “burnt to death”. But his despair gives strategy to a more optimistic interpretation: “In the next few years, the older trees that are still standing could reseed the ground beneath them.”

The novel, which also examines the events from the attitude of animals, ends with a unprecedented vision of hope:

“The smoke and clouds had disappeared. The sun shone brightly through the rain-washed air, and along the ridge the highest peaks were blindingly white with snow. Damp and clean, the northwest wind from the sea blew steadily over the long ridges, and from soaring cones opened by the fiery heat the winged seeds floated to the earth.”

Stewart emphasizes that fireplace is a natural phenomenon and focuses on regrowth. He reminds readers that burning plays an ecologically necessary role and that a seemingly apocalyptic present may soon transform right into a regenerative future.

Life within the Pyrocene

Historian Stephen J. Pyne has called our fire-prone age the Pyrocene. So it's no surprise that increasingly authors are incorporating forest fires into their stories.

Amitav Ghosh's novel “Weapon IslandIn the first chapters there is talk of a wildfire. But Ghosh is not content to let his fiction speak for itself; his non-fiction work 2016 “The great derangement“is an exhortation to contemporary writers to include depictions of natural disasters into their work to reflect the ways through which the disaster impacts on a regular basis life today.

Australian author and Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan's novel from 2020: “The living sea of ​​waking dreams“responds to this challenge.

Unlike Stewart's novel, fire is just not the main focus of the work, which Flanagan describes as “rising cry.” As the story, set in Australia, begins, bushfires are raging and it seems as in the event that they are central to the plot. However, they simply smolder within the background – just as they do in real life for a lot of who will not be directly affected by the fireplace. Still.

As it seems, the actual focus of the novel is the overwhelming experience of living in a world where natural disaster follows natural disaster. It follows protagonist Anna as she seeks relief from her mother's terminal illness by scrolling through social media feeds. She is inundated with limitless images of climate emergencies. Her doomscrolling makes her depressed: “She no longer knew whether the fires were over, even though they hadn’t really started yet.”

Through the glow of her smartphone, Anna sees “photos of glittering snowstorms. The smoke was so thick that you couldn't see the street. Four thousand people…gathered on a beach while firefighters formed a cordon to protect them.”

In other scenes, she looks at picture after picture of animals injured in forest fires. For Anna, “the summer was scary. Smoke was scary… suffocation was scary. Today was scary. Tomorrow would be terrible if we made it that far.”

Like Stewart, nevertheless, Flanagan offers hope: Anna eventually connects with one other character, Lisa, whose interest in environmental history and indigenous fire practices offers a substitute for the isolating terror brought on by social media.

Flanagan ends the novel by rejecting each individualism and apocalyptic sensationalism.

The discovery of an endangered chick turns the story of misery into certainly one of hope. Lisa, who finds the little bird, suddenly sees the world now not as hopelessly burning, but “extraordinarily alive”. By the tip of the novel, she is “neither dejected nor defeated,” but inspired to attach more closely with the land and its people.

Human stories don’t have to finish in catastrophe and death. Instead, disasters can signal the start of something latest, and reading about them can highlight regrowth and recovery within the midst of despair.