Reviewed by Mahmoud Samori
The cover art of Thea Prieto's debut novella coupled with its title, From the Caves, invited this reviewer immediately to consider Plato's famed Allegory of the Cave. Plato's fire, however, is a projector of shadows, a dim replacement of the sun, while Prieto's is so much more. The fires of From the Caves are creatures of destruction and consumption: the cataclysmic Great Fires that broke the world, the bonfire funeral pyre. However, fires are also tools essential for survival; they are cooking fires, boilers of water in pots, and the source of firelight to ease the Dark Sickness of cave living. The fires of From the Caves are a central exhibit in a text intimately concerned with these themes of both mending and consumption.
In Prieto's postapocalyptic setting, resource scarcity is a source of conflict throughout the novella. Scarcity drives the reader and her characters to question: shall a signal fire be extinguished to preserve firewood or become a funeral pyre for one who dedicated their life to belief in the utility of signaling? Is there even time now to consider this question when it's low tide, a storm is coming, and the fog net desperately needs mending? Prieto's characters debate the merits of these questions throughout the text much like the interlocutors of a Platonic dialogue. (The text lacks dialogue markers, further inviting this comparison.) They represent the different sides of a debate, which readers observe and in which they participate. It is easy to identify a voice that represents the pragmatic or utilitarian, a concern with the baser levels of the hierarchy of needs and the gathering and conservation of those resources that fulfill those needs. This is the voice we hear saying: ". . . we sacrificed time, sacrificed food, and water when we told stories, and we'll be forced to make even bigger sacrifices right now if we can't move on." In the pragmatic view, food, water, and time are sacrificed by engaging in the perceived opposition activities: storytelling or expending firewood to fuel a pyre or a signal/symbol to communicate with unknown others who may not exist at all. Throughout From the Caves, we observe characters struggling to balance the value of stories and symbols against that of tools, such as a water bucket or net. So, too, must time, the universal resource, be considered against such needs as food, water, and shelter from a storm.
Beneath this surface tension, the characters debate deeper questions. Of tools, which ones should be used and when? Is a strange object a tool or a part of one or even a creature? Has circumstance rendered a once valuable tool or practice useless because what it was meant to mend no longer exists? Time itself is the most valuable resource as characters must decide as a community what to mend first in a world where so much is broken.
Prieto describes the fractured postapocalyptic setting and her characters with the same language of frailty and rot, evoking visceral responses from each of the reader's senses. It is a tactile world where floors and ceilings, blisters and cheeks are all cracked. A nose, a pelvis, blisters, the horizon, and mounds of asphalt are all broken. We smell the stink of urine, burning hair, stale smoke, body odor and sickness, as well as stolen perfume. Our eyes are confronted with seemingly misplaced colors, an ocean of brown waves, fires belching brown smoke, a mouth of brown teeth. Nothing that the characters can see in their world is green, except the eyes of Green, the old storyteller who "calls tides by their colors." After his death, Green, the color and the storyteller, only exists in the kelps and plants of the old stories that bring blurred dreams of other worlds, "colorful thoughts that ripple the painful ones."
The characters are confronted by a never-before-seen blue tide, and they cannot know whether it is akin to the dangerous red tide or if this is the water they heard of in the old stories: "The color doesn't matter, says Mark. It's all poison." All the characters and reader taste in this poisonous world are the oily smoke and bitter starchy tang of charred roots. Their ears are filled with storm winds, crashing waves, empty buckets clattering, cries of anger or pain, and the words of their stories.
After his death, the community decides to commit Green to the fire. It is a contentious decision. A storm is coming. Among the eulogies at Green's hasty funeral, Mark, the voice of the pragmatic, makes a plea for their future, for mending and gathering: "I can do some of his work, but fixing the fog net and collecting water, I can't do those things alone—I don't want to do them alone." This is the voice that disapproves of the signal fire and the firewood it consumes no less now that it has become Green's pyre. Mark misses the work Green contributed to filling the baser needs of the community but still resents that he "told stories about a past that wasn't real—or even if it was real, couldn't help us anyway." He struggles with the memory of Green, who embodied both the pragmatic skills and knowledge Mark admires and the stories he resents.
Can stories be helpful tools in a broken world? If so, helpful for what? Throughout From the Caves, stories often provoke difficult questions: what's a locust plague? What do trees look like? What's an apple? Stories are traditionally a frame of reference to understand and explain the world. Yet, if the world of those stories no longer exists, are they more useful than what a community might trade to keep those stories alive? Throughout the third book of his Republic, Plato infamously censors stories in his ideal city, worried that, among other things, they could spoil the education of the community's children. From the Caves presents a community similarly concerned with the education of its members. They learn about this broken world just as the reader does: through observation, teaching, and stories. As the community shrinks, more skills have to be learned more quickly. Mark sees no utility in stories about trees told in a world where no one remembers what they look like and curtly answers: "Trees are tall . . . and they're made of firewood." Mark recognizes that stories, like fire, can fend off the Dark Sickness, but they cannot be used to boil water or cook roots.
From the Caves is a story about survival and extinction, about repurposing and spoliation, and perhaps above all about the nature of tools and mending. At the heart of all of these Prieto juxtaposes the pragmatic and the romantic. The story presents this conflict but teaches us, through stories and demonstration, that pragmatism is about mending, that mending is about optimism, that optimism is in many ways a romance with the future, another way of saying hope.