Book Review: The Revenant

By Michael Punke

The Revenant is a thrilling tale of hardship, betrayal and survival against all odds, set in a ruggedly unforgiving milieu. Last fall saw the premier of a film adaptation featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. 

The plot centers on veteran trapper Hugh Glass, who is savagely mauled by a grizzly bear when undertaking an expedition with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. His comrades do their best to patch him up, but his situation looks dire. The financial underpinnings of their company are rather shaky, and with winter rapidly approaching they are desperate to get on with the business of depopulating the wildlife. Otherwise bankruptcy await. Glass is left behind, abandoned by the men he thought he could trust. Against the odds he manages to cling on to life, and he soon sets out on a quest for revenge. If the story had been set today, the sympathy garnered from their predicament would no doubt have secured the crowdsourced funding required to keep the company afloat, but no such option existed in 1821.

Michael Punke is a member of a fairly exclusive club. He is currently serving as the US ambassador to the World Trade Organization and has previously worked on the White House National Security Council staff. Like Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, he manages to combine his day job with a spot of writing on the side. A quick peek through his bibliography reveals that the great American outdoors of the nineteenth century seems to be his great passion.   

The story in The Revenant is partly based on real events, although Punke has made some changes in order to make the narrative more suitable for a novel, as most writers of historical fiction are wont to do. I must say I was slightly surprised when I learned that Hugh Glass and his survival story was real, it seemed too unbelievable to be true. As so often is the case, history is full of riveting stories that are way more unbelievable than what any screen writer could come up with.

The story of Hugh Glass seems to perfectly embody that most cherished and hallowed of heroes in the American psyche. The hardy Yankee, born in a log cabin he built himself, who traverses the Wild West with a Kentucky rifle slung over his shoulder and his steely eyed gaze fixed on the horizon. Everywhere he looks there is a new oil well to drill, new southern belles to rescue from distress, and a pouch full of chewing tobacco to spit into the fire while talking like Jeff Bridges in True Grit. Jeremy Clarkson once remarked while testing a Dodge pickup truck that all Americans secretly dream of being rugged outdoorsmen, and that understanding is key to grasping their appeal. I am starting to think that for once in his life, he was right.

It is fair to say that the Mid West of the early nineteenth century was a pretty rough place, where the strong did what they could and the weak suffered what they must. For my own part, I am fascinated by the allure of the Wild West and the open frontier, but I would have preferred to have spent the early nineteenth century in London, eating a seven course lunch at a gentlemen´s club before taking a cab to the opera house. Despite my distinct lack of longing for sodden underwear and grizzly bears, The Revenant is a riveting read. Punke delights in picturing the savage hardship of the frontier, and I keep turning the pages at a breakneck pace, wanting to see how it will all turn out.

Punke skillfully brings an epic real life tale from this period to life, and even if the steam runs out a little towards the end, I would strongly recommend The Revenant. I haven’t yet seen the film, but it will certainly be interesting to see how it compares to the novel.