The Achievement of Young Men and Fire

“Maclean approved of Orwell, which makes a lot of sense: both men were tough, they could be hard on the people around them, and they saw lean, precise writing not as a stylistic choice but an ethical obligation.”

“Maclean’s overriding ambition was to find in all this some “carefully measured grains of consolation needed to transform catastrophe into tragedy.” Maclean spoke often of the way our lives can assume a design, can take on the shape of art. Tragedy implied design, a key term, and aspiration, for Maclean. Tragedy, he writes in the book, is “inflamed with the disorderly” and yet is also the “most composed” of all art forms. If he could tell the story of Mann Gulch as a tragedy in something like this classical sense, the result would be catharsis and redemption.”