The Fireman

The Fireman is a suspenseful thriller that is deeply concerned about the ambivalence of tribal behavior: the fantastical elements of the story amplify the good side of the powerful feeling of belonging it provides, but also warns us of its many dangers. The Fireman is a thematically-driven novel, whose main fault lies in its undeserved ending.

The story revolves around an apocalyptic pandemic: Dragonscale is what they call a spore that marks your skin with strange stripes and eventually kills you by making your body suddenly go up in flames. People can go on for months without triggering spontaneous combustion, but they all believe a painful death by fire is just a matter of time – and stress.

The protagonist is Harper Grayson, a school nurse that lives with her husband Jakob. Against his wishes, she decides to help out at a hospital, doing volunteer work during the crisis. Despite all her best efforts to protect herself, however, she ends up with Dragonscale and right after discovering she’s pregnant.

The first moments of tension in the book are about the pandemic itself. Schools, for example, are still open despite people everywhere literally going up in flames: since capitalism acts as a perpetual motion machine that doesn’t let human lives get in the way of profit, business must go on as usual. Meanwhile, time is a thing to be dreaded: it takes just a few weeks for the people you know to get infected and pass away, which is shown in a shocking manner at the end of one of the first chapters, when the narrative jumps a little in time and the narrator marks how some of the side characters are now simply dead.

After Harper gets infected, the tension shifts towards her relationship with her husband. Even before this moment, we can already see the signs that there is something off with it: the condescending way in which he speaks to her and of her in one of the first scenes of the novel, when he’s on the phone with a friend and she arrives home, is already a hint of the core issue at play: “She’s fine. Didn’t know a thing about it. She’s home and we’re going to have a good old shouting match if she thinks I’m going to let her back to work anytime soon,” he says to his friend.

This passage may seem innocuous at first, but it quickly becomes revealing. Jakob really believes he lets his wife do things, that he’s in control of her and decides her actions: if she went to work at a hospital despite his wishes, it was only because he was a good husband and allowed it. He believes his will is the one that will always prevail, which is why he never doubts that he’s going to win the shouting match. And the “good old” qualifier also reveals how this event – and its outcome – is a routine in their relationship: they argue, he wins.

In other words, Harper is an abusive relationship: she’s apologetic and submissive, being molded and controlled by her husband. We see how Jakob’s influence on her shapes even some of her views and ideas, how some of her opinions are not really hers, but come from him:

“She had learned from Jakob to think of people who spoke of blessings and faith as simple and a little infirm. People who thought things happened for a reason were to be pitied. Such folk had given up their curiosity for a comforting children’s story.”

Jakob often dismisses her accomplishments, denies her praise and comfort, and blames her for everything. If she’s doing volunteer work, it’s not because she’s altruistic, but in desperate need of validation. When she gets infected, it’s her fault. She should have known better, and even though she took all precautions, Harper agrees with his accusation: “I’m sorry I got sick,” she says. Harper has just caught a disease that makes people spontaneously combust, but her husband is not sorry for her: he’s actually worried that she has infected him, making the event be about himself.

The protagonist is aware of this problem, but she feels powerless to stop it: “Her entire self-worth depended on doing and being just what he wanted her to do and be,” the narrator says, following Harper’s point of view. But the situation changes when she discovers that she’s pregnant and Jakob’s solution to their plight is contemplating suicide. The existence of the baby opens her eyes to the cruelty of her husband’s words and pushes her to take action.

This is when the novel moves to its central subject. After leaving Jakob, Harper is led by a mysterious fireman to a hidden community of people that have Dragonscale but somehow manage to don’t go up in flames. Their secret? They claim it’s harmony.

They defend that the scale reacts to the person’s mental state. If they’re happy, the scale reacts in a positive way, but if they’re scared and afraid, it ignites. In their eyes, the scale only amplifies what the person already feels. As one of the characters puts it:

“If you can create a feeling of security and well-being and acceptance, the Dragonscale will react in a very different way: by making you feel more alive than you’ve ever felt before. It will make colors deeper and tastes richer and emotions stronger. It’s like being set on fire with happiness.”

“Security” and “acceptance”: what this character is saying is related to the feeling of belonging somewhere, of being part of a group. Since this feeling is one of the most powerful a religious community can produce, it’s not a coincidence that this strange community Harper finds herself in has assumed a religious form: even though he’s not a priest of any kind, their leader is still called Father Storey, because he leads them to church every day to sing together in harmony.

“Harmony” is a term that suggests peace, control, and even a certain degree of tranquility, but some of the characters refer to these acts of communion by another term, “tribal behavior”, which has the opposite connotation, evoking notions of violence and chaos. But they also defend that harmony is not only present in tribal behavior, it’s at its core: people are acting as one, in sync, being part of a group, but not necessarily doing good things.

That’s the central problem Harper has to face. The act of belonging makes a person feel great, but to achieve this pleasurable sensation, to belong, they can do harmless things, such as sing and pray together, or they can hang the people their group deems inferior or dangerous. Human beings are social creatures, so much so that when we finally feel we are part of a community, our bodies release a hormone called oxytocin, which gives us that pleasurable sensation. The problem is that tribal behavior doesn’t care about morality to release the hormone, which means a prayer and a murder can feel the same. Since the Dragonscale amplifies this feeling, it makes the prospect of a group turning violent even more worrisome in Harper’s plague-torn world. As the narrator explains, when referring to the amplified effects of oxytocin as “being in the Bright”:

“When you were in the Bright, everything felt good, everything felt right. You didn’t walk. You danced. The world pulsed with a secret song and you were the star of your own Technicolor musical. The blood leaping from her carotid artery would be as beautiful to them as a sparkler throwing a burning red shower of phosphorus.”

Consequently, the novel is concerned with the kind of power leaders can acquire in these types of tight communities. Because their will is rarely questioned – notions of “loyalty”, “union”, and “holy” are reinforced to ensure that – these leaders can form and control a collective ire, guiding it against a particular group of individuals, weaponizing the faith of their flock. The story presents an argument: that when one of these leaders creates a discourse that justifies and legitimizes violence – even if they have the best of intentions when doing so – the feeling of belonging – the oxytocin – makes believing this hateful rhetoric an appealing prospect for the members of their community. What the Dragonscale does, then, is amplify this danger and make its duality more pronounced: it’s called “being in the Bright”, because the characters literally glow when they are under the effect of oxytocin, shining beautifully while doing horrible things.

The leader of Harper’s newfound community is Father Storey, who is seen by his peers as a hopelessly optimistic man. He acts as if people will always choose to do the right thing, even though the circumstances hint at the opposite outcome. If there’s a thief on the loose, Storey urges them to come forward and repent, ensuring all will be forgiven – the thief, of course, doesn’t do that, especially because the people who were robbed are threatening to murder him in very violent ways. When a man is causing trouble – risking all their lives by contacting outsiders – Storey is there to prevent his people from taking drastic measures, ensuring them that the man (an incel named Harold, probably referencing Stephen King’s The Stand) will see the error of his ways.

But what his people mistake is Storey’s motivation: he’s doing those things not because he believes in them, but exactly the opposite. He fears what will happen if his community becomes violent, and so tries to put out their anger before it engulfs their souls: “Every time I see them sing and shine together, I always wonder what would happen if they formed a lynch mob. Do you think the Dragonscale would like a lynch mob as well as a chorus? I do,” he confesses to Harper. But Father Storey won’t be there forever to pacify his people – he’s an old man and this is a long book – and the next in line may not have the same insight. Violence, then, becomes a matter of time.

The Fireman’s narrative succeeds in connecting Harper’s personal plight with this collective danger. While she’s in a journey to take control of herself and her body and become independent, Jakob wants to dominate her, and so does her newfound community. When the titular fireman – a snub, arrogant, but good-hearted man – tells the protagonist of the place, he also warns her about not getting too carried away with their rhetoric: what he’s alerting her is that being part of a group is great, but its ideology can shape her worldview just like her husband’s opinions used to do, making her do and think things she wouldn’t otherwise. So, when Harper opposes her community – refusing to put a stone in her mouth, for instance – she’s making a statement, saying that she won’t let them control her – and, just like Jakob, they don’t take that peacefully.

The other major villain in the book is the Malboro Man, and it’s a neat touch that in a story about fire killing people, and the dangerous side of some pleasurable sensations, one of its villains is named after a famous brand of cigarettes. The Malboro Man represents the cruelty of people that believe the other is a thing that must be destroyed: he doesn’t have Dragonscale and so he hunts down those who do, because in his eyes they represent a danger to everyone else. We can clearly see that he’s a sadist – he brags about the people he killed – and that he dehumanizes his victims precisely to justify this sadism: it’s okay to enjoy killing if what you’re killing is not a person, but a dangerous monster. And there’s a great moment – packed with political undertones – when Harper recognizes this genocidal sadistic villain by the American flag he wears on the back of his shirt.

The narrative in The Fireman is divided into several small chapters that end with a hook, usually with the narrator hinting at the horrible things that are going to happen. This creates a suffocating atmosphere, since in these moments the narrator is usually crushing the characters’ hopes and dreams. Someone will say something akin to “I hope it’s not too late” and the narrator will immediately end the chapter with, “It was though.” This impacts the ending of the novel, because we are expecting this “it was though” to appear, but it never comes, making the resulting hopeful tone feel strange, false even, since it’s the opposite of everything that came before.

Finally, there are some funny moments spread throughout, mainly because Harper is a geek, so the descriptions now and again reflect this trait with some pop culture references appearing in unexpected places: “Allie led her through the looming pagan rocks of Monument Park, to a stone that would’ve been the perfect place to sacrifice Aslam.”

But there are also unintentionally funny ones, such as when Harper feels “an immediate twitch of physical want, florid and absurd, where had been none a minute before” just because she had a glimpse of a guy’s hairy loins – and that’s a man she had just thought to be a “creep” a couple of pages before. This also means her love relationship with this character feels a bit strange and forced: it’s too sudden and undeveloped to work.

The Fireman is a great thematically-driven thriller that explores the complexities of group relations, human nature, and the feeling of belonging. Its ending doesn’t quite land, but the discussions its narrative proposes more than make up for it.

September 07, 2021.