The Great Alone(2019) - Kristin Hannah

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The Great Alone(2019) - Kristin Hannah

In Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone, a desperate family seeks a new beginning in the near-isolated wilderness of Alaska only to find that their unpredictable environment is less threatening than the erratic behavior found in human nature.

Alaska, 1974. Ernt Allbright came home from the Vietnam War a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes the impulsive decision to move his wife and daughter north where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier.

Cora will do anything for the man she loves, even if means following him into the unknown. Thirteen-year-old Leni, caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship, has little choice but to go along, daring to hope this new land promises her family a better future.

In a wild, remote corner of Alaska, the Allbrights find a fiercely independent community of strong men and even stronger women. The long, sunlit days and the generosity of the locals make up for the newcomers’ lack of preparation and dwindling resources.

But as winter approaches and darkness descends, Ernt’s fragile mental state deteriorates. Soon the perils outside pale in comparison to threats from within. In their small cabin, covered in snow, blanketed in eighteen hours of night, Leni and her mother learn the terrible truth: they are on their own.

About the author

Kristin Hannah is the award-winning and bestselling author of more than 20 novels. Her newest novel, The Women, about the nurses who served in the Vietnam war, will be released on February 6, 2024.

The Four Winds was published in February of 2021 and immediately hit #1 on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Indie bookstore's bestseller lists. Additionally, it was selected as a book club pick by the both Today Show and The Book Of the Month club, which named it the best book of 2021.

In 2018, The Great Alone became an instant New York Times #1 bestseller and was named the Best Historical Novel of the Year by Goodreads.

In 2015, The Nightingale became an international blockbuster and was Goodreads Best Historical fiction novel for 2015 and won the coveted People's Choice award for best fiction in the same year. It was named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, iTunes, Buzzfeed, the Wall Street Journal, Paste, and The Week.

The Nightingale is currently in pre-production at Tri Star. Firefly Lane, her beloved novel about two best friends, was the #1 Netflix series around the world, in the week it came out. The popular tv show stars Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke.

A former attorney, Kristin lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Summary by  Goodreads(Goodreads Choice Award)

Alaska, 1974.
Unpredictable. Unforgiving. Untamed.
For a family in crisis, the ultimate test of survival.

Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier.

Thirteen-year-old Leni, a girl coming of age in a tumultuous time, caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship, dares to hope that a new land will lead to a better future for her family. She is desperate for a place to belong. Her mother, Cora, will do anything and go anywhere for the man she loves, even if it means following him into the unknown.

At first, Alaska seems to be the answer to their prayers. In a wild, remote corner of the state, they find a fiercely independent community of strong men and even stronger women. The long, sunlit days and the generosity of the locals make up for the Allbrights’ lack of preparation and dwindling resources.

But as winter approaches and darkness descends on Alaska, Ernt’s fragile mental state deteriorates and the family begins to fracture. Soon the perils outside pale in comparison to threats from within. In their small cabin, covered in snow, blanketed in eighteen hours of night, Leni and her mother learn the terrible truth: they are on their own. In the wild, there is no one to save them but themselves.

In this unforgettable portrait of human frailty and resilience, Kristin Hannah reveals the indomitable character of the modern American pioneer and the spirit of a vanishing Alaska―a place of incomparable beauty and danger. The Great Alone is a daring, beautiful, stay-up-all-night story about love and loss, the fight for survival, and the wildness that lives in both man and nature.

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The Shooting of Dan McGrew

By Robert W. Service

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;

The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;

Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,

And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,

There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.

He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,

Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.

There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;

But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;

And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;

With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,

As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.

Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do,

And I turned my head — and there watching him was the lady that's known as Lou.

His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,

Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.

The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,

So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.

In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;

Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man could play.

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,

And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;

With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,

A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;

While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? —

Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars.

And hunger not of the belly kind, that's banished with bacon and beans,

But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means;

For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above;

But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman's love —

A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true —

(God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, — the lady that's known as Lou.)

Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;

But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear;

That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil's lie;

That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die.

'Twas the crowning cry of a heart's despair, and it thrilled you through and through —

"I guess I'll make it a spread misere", said Dangerous Dan McGrew.

The music almost died away ... then it burst like a pent-up flood;

And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," and my eyes were blind with blood.

The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash,

And the lust awoke to kill, to kill ... then the music stopped with a crash,

And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;

In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;

Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm,

And "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, and none of you care a damn;

But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true,

That one of you is a hound of hell. . .and that one is Dan McGrew."

Then I ducked my head, and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark,

And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark.

Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,

While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that's known as Lou.

These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know.

They say that the stranger was crazed with "hooch," and I'm not denying it's so.

I'm not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two —

The woman that kissed him and — pinched his poke — was the lady that's known as Lou.

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“Out in the Middle of Nowhere”: A Conversation with Kristin HannahRJ Newell talks to Kristin Hannah, author of “The Great Alone,” a novel set in Alaska in the 1970s.

By RJ Newell March 28, 2018

KRISTIN HANNAH, the author of over 20 novels, is best known for her New York Times best seller and Wall Street Journal Book of the Year The Nightingale, a story of sisterhood and resistance in World War II–era France. Her latest novel examines a different type of women’s war, one that speaks to the pressing issues raised by #MeToo and #TimesUp. The Great Alone is set in Alaska in 1974, but its themes — the experience of womanhood, trauma, and personal survival — have special resonance today. The novel’s evocative descriptions of Alaska’s unforgiving climate bring a definite sense of place to the story of 13-year-old Leni Allbright’s harrowing journey into womanhood. With beauty and grit, The Great Alone explores identity, isolation, love, and survival in sisterhood.

Kristin Hannah’s own family migrated to Alaska as homesteaders in the 1980s and later founded the Great Alaska Adventure Lodge, an all-inclusive resort. As her novel’s fictional homesteaders clash over proposed changes in the face of increasing tourism, one might wonder whether the events of The Great Alone aren’t drawn directly from the author’s experience. Leni’s father Ernt perceives the influx of tourists as a threat to his personal freedom; he is reluctant to sacrifice his invisibility for a higher quality of life. But the negative effects of Ernt’s isolation take their toll: facing violence both in nature and from her father, Leni fights to free herself and find a better home.

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear […]

And hunger not of the belly kind, that’s banished with bacon and beans,
But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means …

— Robert Service

Though we’d never spoken before, I felt an immediate connection to Hannah. I also grew up in Alaska, and much of what Hannah describes in The Great Alone rings true to me; the offbeat sensibility of Alaskans is unmistakable, no matter how far they venture into “civilization.” Given Hannah’s warmth and down-to-earth manner, it was easy to picture her sipping coffee from a campfire kettle with the homesteaders who inspired her work. But while her manner is comfortable, her perspective is not: The Great Alone tackles numerous controversial topics, not least among them being domestic violence against women. For this interview, we discussed the landscapes of her fiction, the realities of mental illness, and the challenges women face in Alaska and beyond.

¤

RJ NEWELL: In The Great Alone, Alaska serves as a living stage that reflects and affects the inner lives of your characters. What is it about Alaska in particular that inspired you, and why?

KRISTIN HANNAH: My family has a long history in Alaska … We’ve had three generations up on this piece of land. I’ve always just been really intrigued with the idea of the people in our modern era who are essentially pioneers, who go where others don’t go and who manage to wrest a life from a landscape that is as beautiful as anything you’ve ever seen, but can turn deadly in an instant. I’ve wanted to show that Alaska for a long time. I loved this idea of, you know, Large Marge [an especially resilient character in The Great Alone], who now lives in a yurt and takes her showers at the laundromat and used to be a big-city prosecutor … You’d run across people like that in Alaska all the time.

When I go up and hang out with my dad’s wife’s girlfriends and some of my friends in Alaska, they are such a remarkably different group of women than I’ve met anywhere else. And a lot of them, interestingly enough, were like Cora [Leni’s mother], and came to Alaska because it was their man’s dream. The relationships didn’t go anywhere, but the women stayed. They forged this new life, where they’re now doing stuff like driving carpool in between moose hunts. It’s just amazing to me, sitting and listening to them talk, hearing just how different their world is and how tough they are. And they still band together as women, to support and help each other.

Ernt, Cora, and Leni move to Alaska in the hopes of easing Ernt’s undiagnosed PTSD symptoms — paranoia, flashbacks, nightmares — and to escape “the real world” and its systems that failed them. But up north, the harsh realities of life tend to be multiplied. Can you talk about the way your characters unravel in writing?

I wrote a lot of versions of this. I always knew, once I got started, that I had something pretty serious that I wanted to say. I sort of came of age during the Vietnam War, and I guess I’m just really invested in this topic. Ernt could not have picked a worse place to move to, or made a worse choice with what was going on in his life — this increasing darkness and isolation and cold, and to also stumble across Mad Earl, who sort of feeds into his paranoia.

The real trick for me as a writer was to show this with the honesty that I wanted to show it, and have compassion for Ernt’s situation — even though obviously he becomes incredibly dangerous — and to balance all of that so that it wasn’t a book that was relentlessly grim. It was really important for me that this also be a book about the joy that Leni finds in discovering who she is, how she wants to live … and having to separate from her parents in what are incredibly difficult times.

I felt you did a great job of balancing the coming-of-age tale with a very real and complicated family situation of mental illness and domestic violence, and veterans coming home after the war. There are just so many issues layered within this story.

That’s one of the reasons that I came to the setting in the ’70s, because the world felt as turbulent and unsettled and dangerous then as I think it does now. And I think that these issues — domestic violence, why women stay, mental illness, PTSD, and just teenage adolescence and coming of age — are still at the center of really important conversations that need to be going on.

One thread in the book that at first raised questions for me was the correlation between veteran PTSD and domestic violence. I felt it might be unfair to portray PTSD in that way, as there are countless people in recovery from severe trauma who would never harm a loved one. But the statistics are there: in 2016, Dr. Casey Taft of the Department of Veterans Affairs stated, “Vets with PTSD are three times more likely to be violent.” In examining the issue more closely, I read stories from wives who’ve stayed to care for their husbands, even at great personal risk to themselves, for numerous reasons. Beyond the complex web of abuser-victim relationships, there are other factors: a sense of duty to their country, memories of their partners before the trauma, fear of death, financial security, and more. It’s such a complicated issue. So as an author, were there any extra steps you felt you needed to take in order to ensure that you got the full picture regarding veterans, PTSD, and domestic violence, in order to portray the story of this family most truthfully?

Well, you know, that’s always sort of the question. It’s more difficult, I think, when you’re dealing with an issue that is not only this complex, but that touches so many people’s lives … So many people have been raised in dangerous situations, whether due to PTSD or not. And I do think that we, as a society, as a nation, have not cared for our veterans the way we need to, the way we promised them we would. So I think that’s important. And yes, it was a tightrope on causality … What I ended up doing was not really telling you whether he had been violent before the war or not, but certainly hinting at his controlling behavior and the kind of man he was before Vietnam. So I think that the reader gets to decide with this character, in this instance, what they believe about the connection between PTSD and violence.

Leni’s parents described their relationship as being “like heroin,” equal parts addictive and destructive. What effects can that toxic attachment between parents have on a child?

It was harder to portray Cora than Ernt. I think that all of us have a difficult time understanding why women choose to stay in these relationships. But the truth is that, overwhelmingly, they do. And so I tried to find a way to create a character that was believable. There’s that line in the book — the one you’re talking about — where they compare their love to heroin, and Leni thinks, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” It’s a drug that will kill you. Which tells you — tells the reader — that Ernt and Cora are aware of the danger. What they had called “love” has turned into something dangerous … Cora makes the comparison to cancer, which is purely justification. That’s her saying she’s got an illness — but it’s very different from cancer in terms of the risk that they’re taking and the risk that she’s passing along to her daughter. But I sort of believe that had Leni never been in acute physical danger, Cora probably would have stayed, that she was, in her way, as damaged as he was.

The sensitivity with which you approach each character from all angles is striking. It’s so easy to paint these situations in black and white — you know, “Why doesn’t she leave?”

It’s interesting that it’s coming out at the same time as #MeToo and #TimesUp and all of these questions about women and violence … I think that it’s an interesting sort of offshoot of that conversation.

Yes. That actually propels me into the next question: Self-sacrifice can be seen as a virtue for mothers, and for women in general. But in Cora’s case, her “self-sacrifice” — as she understands it — puts Leni at risk. Her silence puts her daughter at risk. So to free others, we sort of have to free ourselves. Do you feel that this particular lesson applies to other problems that women face today, beyond domestic violence and physical abuse?

That’s an interesting question … I do think that women in general have to constantly fight to be on a level playing field. Because I think a lot of us, especially mothers, have this “self-sacrifice, put everyone else first, try to keep things on an even keel” thing as a part of our societal role. And I think it is difficult to put ourselves first … I do find it interesting that we’re having a lot of conversations about women and violence right now, but domestic violence doesn’t seem to be a part of that conversation. And as I suggest in the book, it’s a difficult topic, because it’s hard for other people to “save” you. But we need — as a society, legally — a way to protect women in these situations.

Things have changed somewhat since the ’70s in terms of women taking legal action against abusive partners, but I feel that women are still at a disadvantage … You have a law background, so do you feel that there are additional changes that need to be made?

Because this book was set in the ’70s, I didn’t do a ton of research in terms of what’s going on with the battered woman defense right now. The last time I looked at it, you know, yes, it exists, but it doesn’t work a lot of the time. What we’re using for standards — it’s too difficult, it really is, because I think a normal person, watching these situations from afar, would usually say, “Why didn’t she just leave?” The psychology of staying is so complex. And female behavior often gets judged by a different standard.

What struck me most deeply, I think, is that the Allbrights are not some fantastical, made-up family — they are fictional participants in an unfortunately all-too-common reality of undiagnosed mental illness, domestic violence, and more. So for readers who have survived, or are surviving, circumstances similar to Leni’s, what message do you hope comes through from your book?

I would want to remind people that there is always hope and there is always change, and you can always have a different future than the past or the present you’re living in … Believe in that, and do your best to make it happen. I hope, as a society, that we focus on domestic violence and the protection of women and children — especially in remote and outlying areas, where they don’t have access to any of the social services that could help them.

Is there anything that you hope male-identified readers in particular will take away from this story?

Oh! That’s an interesting question. You know, I guess what we all want is for men and women to understand each other better, work harder to keep lines of communication and honesty open. I obviously couldn’t have known, when I started this book a couple of years ago, how timely it was going to be, and how much it has to say about what’s going on in our world right now.

The title is reference to “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” by Robert Service. Do you feel that everyone has some version of that “Great Alone” within them on some level? And if so, what do you think is the key to finding oneself in it?

You know, I grew up with my dad reciting Robert Service to us around the campfire when we were out in the middle of nowhere. And “the Great Alone” is just one of those phrases that really sticks with you … It has sort of been in my subconscious my whole life … As you go up to Alaska, you see these magnificent vistas … You see it in the summer and you go, “This is just the most gorgeous place on the planet!” And then you see it in the winter and you think, “I don’t believe I could survive here…”

When it comes down to it, in a fight for survival against the environment, your landscape, and the world of your own family, you know it all comes down to each person’s individual spirit, and what they have inside of them, and how much they’re willing to risk and do to survive … Ultimately, that is “the Great Alone.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/middle-nowhere-conversation-kristin-hannah/

“Out in the Middle of Nowhere”: A Conversation with Kristin Hannah | Los Angeles Review of Books

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https://www.ocregister.com/2018/06/29/author-kristin-hannah-tells-a-coming-of-age-story-set-in-the-harsh-yet-beautiful-landscape-of-alaska-in-her-new-book-the-great-alone/

https://areadersblog.com/book-review-the-great-alone-by-kristin-hannah/

Book Review…The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

https://www.maryse.net/books/book-review-the-great-alone-by-kristin-hannah.html

Book Review - The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah - Maryse's Book Blog

https://blog.naver.com/s_haedal/223626623721

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