The New Wilderness - A Review
This book begins with a stillbirth, a tragic loss, yet the woman who had just left the tiny body behind in the wilderness seemed somehow cold and distant to me. When I first started reading this book, I didn’t make it very far before setting it aside. But eventually my curiosity of where the story would go drew me back in.
Set in an undefined future time in a large tract of uninhabited land, called the “Wilderness State,” the story follows a small group of people who have been allowed to live as nomads on the land. The world they now live in, is described in bits and pieces, but never fully. By piecing it together, you do soon realize that the majority of people live in a tightly packed and very large city and that access to nature is extremely limited. It’s an interesting imagined future, where land is divided up by purpose, in what we can only assume is a reaction to climate and environmental crises. But that again, is never fully defined, the author leaving it to our imagination.
The story follows most closely a mother and her daughter. Having moved to the wilderness state when her daughter was quite young in order to save her life, the daughter knows mostly just this savage and wild life they are living. The mother seems to be more divided between the before and after, tied to both this new way of living and yet still longing for the old.
There are explorations of humanity, and what people would act like were they forced to live so closely with nature, a reminder that we are after all still animals. There are moments of teamwork and unity and moments of strife, jealousy, anger, and cruelty. There are themes of resistance and survival. The story covers many years, through which the little tribe shrinks and grows. They are always struggling against the desire to settle, forced to continue to move by the rangers who are employed to guard the land.
In the end, this seems mostly to be a story about relationship, particularly that between a mother and a daughter (whether that relationship is by blood or choice). It’s a story of growing up, separation, longing, and love. It’s a story about striving to understand those who, while so close to us physically and relationally, seem to live in a completely different version of the world. And, as the opening scene suggests, it‘s a story about loss—physical, emotional, cultural, environmental, and existential.
Author: Diane Cook
Published: 2020
Awards: Finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize; Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers’ Favorite Science Fiction (2020)
Other Books by author: Man V. Nature (2014)
Genre: Distopian Fiction
Setting: Somewhere on earth
Themes: Relationship, Family, Environmental crisis, Survival, Loss
How I found this book: NPR Recommendation by Jamie York
My Recommendation: High (but with a disclaimer that it does go very dark in places)
