Fire is an inextricable part of the region’s identity, as the writers knew. But the way this divided city burns has been transformed

Talking about fire and Los Angeles is an exercise in repetition. Southern California does have seasons, Joan Didion once noted in Blue Nights, among them “the season when the fire comes”.

Fire in Los Angeles has a singular ability to shock, with its destruction that takes “grimly familiar pathways” down the canyons and into the subdivisions. The phrase comes from the writer and activist Mike Davis’s 1995 essay The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, and it is as true for the fires as for our talk of the fires. Even our reflections take on that grim familiarity: we cite Didion citing Nathanael West. We fall in with the great writers of this great city who are always so ready to judge it.