I normally hesitate to classify books by gender, but Michael Punke’s novel The Revenant is perhaps the most macho book I’ve ever read. Everything about it is manly: from the theme of hunting in the Rocky Mountains to the descriptions of their weapons. There are very few women in the novel, appearing only as romantic interests.
You have first a backstory of the villainous Fitzgerald, the trapper who robs our hero Hugh Glass of his beloved rifle and leaves him to die. It transpires that in his past he fell in love with a “young whore at a dockside saloon, a French girl named Dominique Perrau.” Fitzgerald is driven to a life in the wilderness after he kills Dominique and one of her customers, and has to flee his home town of New Orleans.
Enter, pursuing a bear
Glass’s story emerges almost as a mirror image of Fitzgerald’s: the young woman is there, but she is pure and chaste, and he offers to marry her before he goes to sea. Upon his return to civilisation, he writes a letter to his mother, only to receive a reply from his brother telling him both mother and fiancee are dead.
Much like his counterpart, Glass realises there’s nothing to keep him going home any more, so he undertakes to work with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. That’s all we ever learn about his beloved in the book, apart from a brief two paragraph description of her.
“She was travelled and educated, talking easily about far-off peoples and places. They could speak an abbreviated language, each able to complete the other’s thoughts. They laughed easily at each other’s stories.” One would think after this classic love story, unfolding after a classic meet-cute (they meet at a Fourth of July celebration, where “Glass senses something unique about Elizabeth, something confident and challenging”) that you’d hear more about her as the pages turn, but after that it’s back to manly business.
To be fair, a large chunk of the book deals with staying alive. Glass is attacked very early on by a grizzly bear (which you may recall from the number of memes around Leo DiCaprio’s Oscar win for the movie based on the same book), and the rest of the trappers have to decide whether to save him – and move slower – or move on. The leader quickly takes a decision: two men will stay behind with Glass and bury him when the time comes, and catch up with the rest of the group. That’s when Fitzgerald’s treachery comes in.
He is left to care for Glass with a boy named Jim Bridger, and at the first sign of trouble (from the warring Native American tribes in that area), he steals Glass’s gun and runs away. The rest of the book is just Glass recovering from his bear attack and slowly but surely making sure he gets revenge on the men who all but killed him.
Like reading a movie
There’s a funny thing about reading a book when there’s a famous movie based on it. For instance, I read some of the Harry Potter series before the movies started coming out, but try as I might, I can’t imagine Hermione as a gawky, bucktoothed girl with too frizzy hair – she’s always Emma Watson, a pretty slight child, who grew up into a stunning woman.
Similarly, though I decided against watching the movie until I had finished the book, Glass’s face swims up in my mind as DiCaprio’s. I can see him doing this role, in fact, there were times when my mind was translating passages of text into scenes from a film, watching Leo kill and eat a rattlesnake, watching Leo make his way through a burnt out village, even watching Leo as he lay sick from the bear attack, and reading about his lips described as parched, I could almost see the camera zooming in to focus on them.
To be concise: I read The Revenant as though it was an Oscar-winning film, and therefore I’m not sure if I liked it for itself or because it made the movie sound so good.
However, I’ve realised that among the genres I am inexplicably drawn to despite – or perhaps because of – their descriptions of gore, is the animal attack ones. Toss me a story about a pet chimp ripping someone’s face off and I read, morbidly fascinated, till the very end. Send me a link about human remains in crocodile stomachs and it’s almost like I’m there. The descriptions of a lonely time in America’s history, when nothing stood in the way between man and wild. It’s the kind of book you should take along on a camping trip, perhaps, or when you’re just tired of urban living.
To end with: The Revenant is a macho book, yes, but in the end, it’s a story of survival and getting along. Is the writing superlative? Probably not, there are just a tad too many adjectives, but it keeps you going and up at night and increases your heart rate. And hey, it taught me how to scare off a pack of wolves to eat some raw buffalo calf, so there’s that. Always a useful life lesson.
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of five books, most recently a collection of short stories titled Before, And Then After and a novel titled Split.