Fire

by George R. Stewart

Spitcat, a raging forest fire in the Sierra Nevada of California, had a lifespan of merely eleven days, "yet its effects could be reckoned ahead in centuries." So writes George R. Stewart in this engrossing novel of a fire started by lightning in the dry heat of September, and fanned out of control by unexpected winds. The book begins with the origins of the fire—smoldering quietly at first, unnoticed, then suddenly bursting into a terrifying inferno, devouring trees and animals over acre after acre and leaving nothing but desolation in its wake.



Firefighters and lookouts, forest rangers and smokejumpers—as well as animals in the forest, many of them the bewildered victims of the blaze, and all the varied trees and bushes there—are characters of this realistic story.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Nature, Environment, Literature, 20th Century

336 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1971

About the author

George Rippey Stewart was an American toponymist, a novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his only science fiction novel Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic novel, for which he won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was dramatized on radio's Escape and inspired Stephen King's The Stand .

His 1941 novel Storm , featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm called Maria, prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms and inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical "Paint Your Wagon." Storm was dramatized as "A Storm Called Maria" on a 1959 episode of ABC's Disneyland. Two other novels, Ordeal by Hunger (1936) and Fire (1948) also evoked environmental catastrophes.

Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956-57, and he once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names. His best-known academic work is Names on the Land A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945; reprinted, New York Review Books, 2008). He wrote three other books on place-names, A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names (1970), Names on the Globe (1975), and American Given Names (1979). His scholarly works on the poetic meter of ballads (published under the name George R. Stewart, Jr.), beginning with his 1922 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, remain important in their field.

His 1959 book Pickett's Charge is a detailed history of the final attack at Gettysburg.

Reviews

[Tony]

So the proverb might well run, "Where there is man, there is fire!" Yet the proverb can not be reversed. Though fire may well rank as the first triumph of domestication, yet it still--like the wild pig and wolf--thrives without man. In English, wild-fire, first means what it still implies--a conflagration kindled and burning without the hand of man.

You can't say my reading choices aren't timely. I bought this, though, at a used bookstore before the current Los Angeles fires began. Then it seemed the right time to accompany the news.

This book, written in 1948, follows stylistically the author's previous nature disaster novel - Storm - in that the particular disaster seems actually a character, and we follow it from its first little burp through its massive destruction, and end. Ten days, a chapter each. There are humans, of course, and they are defined by their actions with the Fire. At the risk of plot-spoiling, if a character is introduced, but unnamed, they will not survive the chapter. Same goes for the unnamed rabbit, and doe.

The publication date is not unimportant, there being significant differences between then and now. The fictional Fire occurs in a fictional area of the Sierra Nevada, and while destructive, it never reaches L.A. It's starts with a lightning strike, not a careless homeless person or an ill-advised fireworks display. The wind gusts reach 20 m.p.h., not 80. There are no planes or helicopters dousing from above. Just men with shovels and other more ancient tools.

There was one woman, a lookout, and one of the more interesting characters. Of course, a few men treat her with predictable derision, so I thought, well, the author is exposing a fundamental inequity. But then he kept dressing and undressing her, like a Barbie doll, so I wasn't really sure of his intentions. The same with his treatment of racial issues. He always put the phrase "colored boys" between some character's quotation marks, but still.

As the author writes: Men are the easiest of all tools to get out of order.

This was so similar to Storm in structure and plotting that I probably would have been better off reading one or the other. Probably Storm.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is all about a fiction fire that blows up in California. The location is fictionalized using real place names, but they aren’t near each other as stated in the book. The location is generally in the Sierra Nevada Mountains somewhere between Reno and Sacramento.

The characters are not fully fleshed out characters in the book, they are mere placeholders really for the jobs they do. A few characters do get some motivations and an extremely small amount of their life outside of the fire, but generally even then not more than a couple of sentences. Instead the main character that is fully explained and detailed is the fire. The Spitcat.

The book is broken up in “days” as the first day is the lightning strike that will create the fire. This first two chapters/days are more involved with the people, such as the Supervisor of the forest district and the fire lookout, which is a young woman. This is the only woman taking a “man’s” job during the firefighting operation. The only other women are not even named, but are secretary timekeepers or cooks.

The book was written in the 1940s, and the date does show. Not only with the sexism but also with the techniques of fighting fires and the approach to it.

I liked how the book described all the ways they pulled men in to help fight the fire. There were first the young boys, high school age doing summer work in the mountains. Then they had the smoke jumpers come in. By the time the fire blew-up they needed an army of men, they came in from other districts. They went and recruited from the streets of skid-rows in Stockton, Reno and Sacramento. They called these men pogies. They also brought in soldiers and convicts.

The book has two viewpoints, one that the forest is there to be used by man and the other to be remain pristine as a natural park for beauty. While the animals are of concern, there isn’t any concern about ecology or natural systems in how everything is connected.

In any case, this is a through telling of a fire burning through a forest.

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll admitI couldn't finish this, but it's a worthy time capsule of the life of firefighters in the late 1940s. It's clearly written for a young audience (junior high) and very slow.

[Aileen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked the fire bits and the forest bits, didn’t so much like the people bits.

[Richard]

The author of this book wrote a lot, but the one title that recently caught my attention was Storm, because it was central to how we came to name hurricanes (and tropical storms).

But as I discovered that, fires were raging in California. Dozens are dead, the economic damage is likely to be in the billions, and the smoke and ashfall here in San Francisco are enough to turn the fog yellow and generate severe air quality warnings. And it turns out he wrote this book, Fire, too. Set, of course, in California. (Storm also mostly takes place in California.)

The New York Times thought both were pretty good, according to the author's obituary.

The other book is Earth Abides, which is an early entrant in that perennial sub-sub-genre of apocalyptic science fiction. I think I read that several decades ago, but it's a classic and now I want to re-read it.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such vivid detailed descriptions of the forest, I felt like I was taking a little visit to the Sierra Nevada every time I settled down for a read. Although the slow pace has turned off some readers, I think it captures the quiet nature of the forest and the slow development of trying to fight a forest fire. The action was exciting enough to keep me reading. The characters' emotional development resonates, although the one female character is saddled with some unrealistic, antiquated actions and dialogue. Stewart's bold, weighty metaphors give the novel a sometimes-amusing historical feeling. This sweeping drama captures the world of the late 40s, from the "benevolent sexism" to the men home from war to all the techniques used to fight a forest fire at the time. If you enjoy a quiet book, have an interest in forest fires or want a little break from modern fiction, I recommend "Fire."

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with his other books, namely Earth Abides and Storm, Stewart's writing strength lies in his non-human characters. The immense pragmatism of this novel almost made me forget that it was fiction. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

[Sunhawk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread after decades; fascinating to see (1) the ways this book, and Stewart's writing and worldview, changed my life (my father read this with me 66 years ago) and (2) how wildfires have changed (the biggest mention in the book ws just over 100,000 acres; the August Complex fire in 2020 burned over a million). Stewart's human approach is still very readable.

[Kathryn Berla · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 The part about the fire and fire-fighting was quite interesting. The characters were meh 😒

[Jeremy Lasky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well plotted account of a fictional California wildfire from its tiny beginning through its height and eventual end. I found the descriptions of how fire works from a micro to a macro level fascinating. Some of the characterizations, especially of the female ranger, are pretty stereotypical for 1948 when the book was written but that does not take away from the overall enjoyment of the book once framed in historical context.

[Barbara Lock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting story with drawn out and detailed descriptions of physical events including the large forest fire such that they seem to be characters, without acutal personification.

A multi-page description of a minor (or even non-) character's death due to fire is one of the most interesting and absorbing treatments I have ever read.

[Wherefore Art Thou · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much has changed since Stewart wrote Fire. Climate change, that has intensified fires in California and Texas, for one. Also, firefighting techniques have improved a lot, we use water now. But more noticeably, a change in mentality about forest fires that would, if written today, never have produced this quintessential man-versus-nature battle of strength. Forests are deliberately burned now, controlled burns. Large trees are allowed to fall, and we have a greater knowledge of the fire cycle and the health of the ecosystem that depends on it. Only briefly is fire’s better half touched upon in Fire: once, when beetles drawn towards flame fly to burrow into weakened wood, and at the very end, when seeds drift from cones to the ground. In fact, the earth is described as desolate and useless following the fire, rather than reality, which is a nutrient dense canvas ready for fire-adapted seeds to spring to life quickly.

Instead, when get a set of men who beat fire back like it’s a biblical evil, and face the entirety of its wrath. Repeatedly, the fire escapes containment, and physical and mental energies are depleted from the widening crew. We hear from them, Judith, a rare woman in forestry, manning a fire tower (she’s done a little unfairly by the end here I must say), bugs, birds and mammals (some of my favorite parts) and… no person involuntarily present. This fire is contained, in spite of its irascibility, within unpopulated forests. Nobody had to lose their home, though a couple lose their lives. Perhaps he wanted to play it safe, or the theological ties he makes to the human experience with fire would be severed if a village full of innocents was burned.

Without much human collateral damage, we can hone in on the spread of destruction, and the seeming futility in attempts to fight it, though fight it they will need to. Particularly thrilling. Through it all, characters get to learn things: Bart learns when to let others take charge, Super/Ranger to organize and relate to people and conquer his self doubts, and Judith… well I guess she learned she was lonely after all and needed a man. Eh. The writing is nothing to write home about, but it’s good in enough ways to shed serious critique.

A lot of good touches, some nice theological ties, and the animals were great. Would recommend.

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boy what a disappointing read. What initially sounded like an interesting concept for a novel ended up being tedious and slow and really not worth the time.

Uh a forest fire breaks out in a fictional Californian national park. We follow various people around the emergency, such as fire watch personnel, the supervisor of the park rangers, the fire chief for the forest, various individuals who fight the fires, and even some animals and the fire itself. What unfolds is the whole life and death of the fire, and its far reaching impact, not only as it rages on, but afterwards as well.

This started out interesting, and when I say "started out" what I really mean is in the first few pages or so when we are actually following the fire, getting a first-hand view at what is happening with it, how it is creeping along and struggling to survive. We quickly lose that momentum when we start getting introduced to the massive cast of human characters.

This book was written in like 1948 and it shows. Every moment we spend with a given human character feels dated and strange. Everyone speaks like an Archie character and for a book about a forest fire, there's a surprising amount of weird sexism (complete with a strange, forced romance?) and race comments. Something something it is a product of its time, yes I know. But I don't know why it was included to begin with.

But mostly this was dull because the majority of it was just kind of a logistical retelling. Sure we get some conversations, we get the perspective of a deer, and a squirrel, and a rabbit. But mostly we are just getting a rote retelling of everything that is happening without any tension or intrigue. It will focus on the type of truck that is carrying a few men, what their jobs were before they decided to fight the fire, how they spread around the fire to try to block off a line with their tools, how they take a break and rest, how they walk the perimeter of the fire to see if there are any jumps over the firebreak line. etc. etc. etc. It was just boring.

I should have DNFed it, it took me like 3x as long as it should have to finish a fairly short book.

[John Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

George R. Stewart is famous for his non-fiction work regarding the origin of place names in America. He clearly has a deep appreciation for everything involving natural history and the best parts of Fire are those that describe the land, the flora and fauna, the overarching weather patterns that influence the region and the fire itself.
What Stewart lacks is the ability of the novelist to illuminate the mystery and contradictions of human character as they unfold in real time. His characters plod along in platonic forms--- the shadows on the cave walls shifting and changing go unnoticed. Only the fire changes.
Fire was published in 1948 and that was part of my curiosity, if there was some larger metaphor at work regarding war and fascism. Occasionally they were references to fighting the fire like a battle etc but this was all very rote. If there is a larger message in Fire it is as a time capsule representation of the black and white postwar world, where men had names like Slim and Slugger and women, mostly unnamed, had only the opportunity to find the right man .
When the skid row denizens are rounded up to fight the out of control fire I found myself wishing Stienbeck would appear to breathe form into these straw men. Instead they pass through the story like more cardboard cut outs. The passages describing the fire lookout-- a woman , seem only to serve as a sort of wonder that a woman could do this-- though inevitably she becomes a target of affection and needs to be rescued. I found myself thinking here about Kerouac describing his stint as a fire lookout in The Dharma bums.
Like Jack I wanted to go down the mountain and find a jazz bar in North Beach .
Finally, Fire reminded me of The Towering Inferno, or the Posieden Adventure. The flat stilted dialogue seemed perfect for a Nicholas Cage blockbuster.

[brendan · Rating 2 out of 5]

2-2.5/5
I somehow got an advanced copy of this book and while it was interesting in its plot and sequencing I really felt the diction and rhetorical devices made this novel fall short. The former especially was hard to critique because there really are only so many ways one can describe or personify a fire, but that doesn’t mean it always has to “lick” up a branch, the fur of an animal, an azalea, et cetera. It’s presumptuous to say (I’ve never wrote a book before after all) but if you have such a focal and ceaseless conflict in your book, get creative!

Another gripe I had were the abundance of similes, which made me feel like I was not meant to know the comparisons made without being explicitly told what the comparisons were. Metaphors are few and far between (or, at least, are overshadowed by the over-saturation of similes) which stinks because I feel they’re a much more inventive and challenging way for readers to make connections without being spoon-fed the prose at hand.

I must say thought the plot and characters were great. I really enjoyed how this book divvied itself up into vignettes and mini-chapters. Godoy and Bart were especially interesting, and Stewart’s writing of Godoy’s parts felt very inventive. It feels to me that all the characters are (maybe obviously) meant to be some sort of representation of the human as a whole, like they’re typified to be one emotion or internal conflict we all may face.

It isn’t a terrible book by any means, but strong points are apparent, and weak points are also especially so.

[Cordelicacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a book about a fire. We learn about how it was started, how it grew, what it was called, how it touched the lives of the trees, wildlife, and people, and then how it died. This felt more like a work of art than a regular book, to be honest, and that might be why it took some effort to get through, but it was worth the read. I really liked the description of how people organized to fight the fire and the play-by-play description of how the fire spread, down to details like how a pinecone rolled down a slope or a rabbit sped out of its hiding place. There were musing on the relationship between man and fire, and the utter destruction that could be created by fire, and it could have gotten melodramatic, but it worked amid an actual story of a fire.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as satisfying as his classic "Storm," but still an impressive achievement in looking at complex meteorological phenomena and how the interact with biological, geological, and human systems. I think the choice to name human characters here, unlike in "Storm," almost works against the book; but the book picks up momentum in the latter days of the fire and he really helps you understand the different types and qualities of forest fires and how they interact with changes in terrain and vegetation. Still a worthwhile read.

[Christine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not a surprise, I couldn't get into his Storm either. I think part of the problem for me with this one, is how he describes the women fire watcher as girl constantly, and doesn't use her name as much as he uses the men's names. It is irksome. He writes good squirrels though, and his descriptions of the fire are pretty wonderful.

[Derrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book features uninteresting characters, dated dialogue and an obsession with the logistics of fighting a forest fire. There is no plot worth mentioning…there is a fire and they put it out. The book was published in 1948 and its awkward commentary on race relations and its stilted attempt at a romantic storyline are very much of its time. There is the occasional beautiful sentence.

[Lila · Rating 4 out of 5]

A timely weather-related novel that follows the breakout of a September forest fire in a fictional region of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Although the handling of the women characters are what one would expect for a book originally published in 1948, the female fire spotter is capable at her job as she sits alone in her lookout tower.

There are quite a few characters to keep track of as various roles are played out and this makes the novel a bit of a challenge to get into. Once you do, however, you learn a lot about the details of organizing forest fighting and the cost to the wildlife.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like his “Storm,” this novel features Stewart’s ability to write through a natural event with a large cast of characters in a way that doesn’t feel gimmicky. There’s a certain tone in his writing that I quite like—a feeling that borders on the sentimental and dramatic without ever going fully sappy.

[Braden · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do enjoy George Stewart's way of making natural phenomena essentially the main characters of his novels. In the end, it was a little too slow; I had to push myself through the end. But I did enjoy it.

[Beckett Zinn-Rowthorn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting narrative experiment. It's at its best in the chapters where the Spitcat Fire itself serves as the main character. Stewarts knowledge of wildfires and firefighting is a boon. The human characters are somewhat flat, but overall an enjoyable read.

[John Francy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An education on fires and fire controls from a very knowledgable author. The book is a bit slow in some respects but it follows the course of the fire in great detail which is why it resonates and informs.

[Kye Alms · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was just okay to me, it seems like it would make a good short story rather than a novel. It was just slow paced to me with characters I didn’t really like. However, the descriptions of the fire and the nature around it were absolutely amazing. Overall, this was just okay.

[Carsie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've got family in California, and they talk about the fires. This book made the whole experience feel very real for me. Gripping.

[Sheehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only criticism is the totally gratuitous romance between lookout and another character...everything else was pretty prescient and relevant of present, the romance was a tossaway literary gimmick.

[Carly · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Fun read!

[Emily M · Rating 4 out of 5]

My childhood fear of fire has transformed into an adult fear of fire.

[Anne Stachofsky · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing was too technical (lots of descriptions of the fire & its movements & the weather) for me to really get in to it.