Silas House talks climate change, community, love and not killing the dog | Opinion
If there’s one thing Kentucky author Silas House wants you to know about his latest book “Lark Ascending” it’s that the dog, which comprises one of the book’s trio of main characters, is not killed.
Seamus is a beagle who tells part of the story in “Lark Ascending,” and to him fall some of the lighter, optimistic parts of a book that’s punctuated with turmoil, survival and upheaval in a fictional(ish) America set roughly two decades into the future.
“Dogs are, as far as we know, not aware of their impending demise the way we are, so they’re not existential the way we are,” House tells me.
A fundamentalist regime (called the Fundies) who imprisons and murders those opposed to their beliefs has taken over the United States; as wildfires brought on by climate change burn the earth in House’s seventh novel published last year. It’s a darker book, which makes the bits with Seamus ever more appreciated.
Themes of community, love and environmentalism permeate throughout the book as we travel along and see this world through the eyes of our main character Lark. Lark, and others, are trying to make it to Ireland–believed to be the last safe refuge for them.
I spoke with House recently as part of the Herald-Leader’s Kentucky book club about some of the central themes of his novel. This won’t be a review, per say, but do beware of potential spoilers as that does come with the territory.
Climate change
As House tells it, he was an environmentalist even before he knew what the term meant. Hailing from a coal mining family, growing up across from a massive strip mine, he recognized the cost resource extraction has on the people of an area.
A bit later in life, he became more involved with environmental justice work and in the present day he’s seen the whole conversation shift.
“I think a lot more people cannot deny that climate change is happening,” he said. “I mean you can see it so easily, in so many ways.”
I spoke with House not too long after smoke from the Canadian wildfires began covering the East Coast; producing some especially orange-tinted photos of New York City showing the metropolis essentially choked in a haze. An additional layer of irony is that I write this while Lexington, and most of Kentucky, is experiencing poor air quality as a result of these fires.
Regarding those wildfires, some may say, “Oh, that’s normal/due to forest management, is actually good for the forest, etc.” To that I say, these are simply the worst wildfires we’ve seen…so far, let’s not count out how it will get worse.
House said he began writing “Lark Ascending” during a separate bout of wildfires that plagued Australia a few years ago. The fires, he said, felt like they were getting closer and closer, so in “Lark Ascending” the fires ultimately force Lark, his parents, his friends Sera and Arlo and their mother Phoebe to seek refuge in the mountains of Maine.
As much as “Lark Ascending” was written as a story of hope, the premise is one based in House’s own personal fears as they pertain to climate change.
“To me, the book is about my greatest fears, and one of those is that I’m going to live to see catastrophic weather change and that my children are going to live through the real ramifications of that.”
Community
If climate change and the authoritarian government run by the Fundies is the impetus of the novel then it’s the ongoing search for a community, a home, that keeps the whole ship sailing.
Lark, his parents, Sera, Arlo and their mother Phoebe spend several years hiding out in the mountains of Maine where they form a community of their own. Eventually the fires force them out and it’s also during this time that Lark comes to terms with his feelings for Alro.
The love between the two young men, which they are cautioned to hide for fear of the Fundies, is the other defining theme of the novel, and their relationship tells a “tender love story” House said he’s long wanted to write.
These intervening years in the mountains of Maine sees our characters forge this community in an otherwise dystopian world, but it’s short-lived. Tragedy befalls them all in due time; it is only Lark who makes it to Ireland.
Once in Ireland he must survive and push forward, urged by the final words of his mother, as he travels to Glendalough. He meets Seamus along the way and the last of our main cast Helen, a woman with an uncertain past.
Community is important, that need for others, but it’s likewise a cautionary tale in “Lark Ascending” as anytime there is a group of people “one person is going to rise up and want to take control,” House says.
“I think some of that might be a reflection of my age,” he said. “The older I get the smaller my circle becomes…and the more loving that circle is, and the more complex those relationships are, so I was thinking a lot about that.”
Love
For all the heavy-hitting apocalyptic beats the novel has, at the core is a queer love story between Lark and Arlo.
Keeping in line with this being a novel written in a future, where the stepping stones for this hellish world are already being laid down, House says there’s no shortage of homophobia, bigotry and discrimination which further highlights the thesis of the novel.
He points towards the recently passed anti-LGBTQ bill Senate Bill 150 as an example here in the commonwealth.
“We have so much anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and legislation, I mean we had it right here in Kentucky with several bills. Luckily, only one of them got through, but it’s a very strong one,” House said.
As House reminds me, “Lark Ascending” is still very much a book about a family in Appalachia, as his other novels are, although I sometimes forget those ancient mountains stretch up into Maine.
In this sense, the relationship between Lark and Arlo blossoms in a rather rural, isolated community–a metaphor that could be extended to places like rural Kentucky.
I spoke with House about a week after an incident in his hometown of Corbin where a small protest in support of human rights and LGBTQ pride ended with a gun being brandished, slurs thrown out and a man touted his ties to the Ku Klux Klan. No arrests were made.
House, himself one of the most highly visible LGBTQ people in Kentucky and the South, says when he witnesses bigotry in his home that it hurts him deeply, but likewise shows him that people are strong.
“It illuminates that there are LGBTQ people in small towns in rural Kentucky and they are standing up for themselves, and who are standing up for others,” he said. “There were not only LGBTQ people there, there were allies there who were standing up for friends and family that they love and standing against these bigoted laws.”
Seamus the beagle is not killed, however, and if you’ve made it this far, he does die; reading the book you quickly learn events are being told by a Lark of a far-off future and dogs, sadly, do not live forever.
I can only hope that in House’s next book, or perhaps in his role as Kentucky’s newest poet laureate, he will create some work of fiction about a world ruled by beagles.
