The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

Someone asked me a question the other day and I had to check the calendar that it is, in fact, 2019. They asked me if this is ‘a book for women, or for everyone’. (I was tempted to add an Emoji here). But to answer the antiquated question, yes, both men and women would enjoy it. Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone is set in the 1970s in an untamed Alaska. It’s an adventure story capturing the challenges this rugged land posed to both men and women homesteading in an unforgiving wilderness.

Granted, it is told from a woman’s (in this case a young teenage girl) point of view and it does perhaps focus on the enduring strength of women, but it is ultimately an epic story of human survival and of a family tested beyond endurance.

I was in awe of Hannah’s vivid descriptions of the vast beauty of Alaska in summer with up to 18 hours of daylight set against the sharp contrast of the cruel dark winters with less than six weak daylight hours.

These pioneers of the early seventies were mostly brave adventurers, those who wanted to escape the system or the conventions of post-Vietnam America with its hippies and protests and a government trying to stabilise a spiralling post-war country.

Leni, at thirteen, is caught up in her parents’ co-dependent relationship, her father’s post-war stress in the form of mindless violence and terrible dreams (now known as post-traumatic stress disorder) and their dream of going to Alaska in search of a new beginning.

An only child, she is her mother’s best friend, confidant and co-conspirator, and is forced to grow up very quickly as the Alaskan way of life demands her to adapt to a life without electricity, radio, television or bathroom, and involves constant dangers, poverty and hunger. In their clapped up VW kombi-hippie bus with her mother dressed in bell bottoms and a bandanna around her long blond hair, her family arrives completely unprepared for life at the Alaskan frontier.

Survival requires that everyone works – first to make their shack liveable and then to prepare for eight months of winter – fishing salmon, hunting, gardening, canning, safeguarding themselves against the elements and eighteen hours of darkness per day during the winter. These endless tasks occupy most of the daylight hours during the summer months. Luckily Leni finds her escape in her love for reading, and when the weather allows to attend a small local school, where she meets her soul mate.

Of course, it’s also a celebration of the immense capacity and strength of women and what they would sacrifice for love. Leni and her mother are not only faced with the dangers from the unpredictable wilderness in which they live, but also have to contend with the dark danger lurking in their own home where a violent and unbalanced Vietnam veteran rules.

In looking back years later, Leni says of Alaska: ‘Where you will either become your best self and flourish or you will run away, screaming, from the dark and the cold and the hardship. There is no middle ground, no safe place; not here, in the Great Alone.’

The writer has first-hand experience to describe in colourful detail what the visual and emotional nuances of living and surviving in Alaska entailed (her father had also packed them off on a family adventure to set up home in Alaska when she was a child). How the few that made it past their first winter and stayed, learnt to depend on each other and to operate in a society where individuals are free to make up their own rules as they go.

The book is made even better by Hannah’s extensive research of the topic, and the way in which she manages to introduce the reader to a whole different world and a way of life, and still makes it feel authentic.

She is an outstanding novelist with a knack to bring her characters to life in a such a way that you feel as though you’ve known them all your life and that you’ve become part of their family.

I felt a keen sense of loss when I finished the book, and that says it all.