There used to be a cultural belief, in an era before she was born, that having close ties to nature made one a better person. And when they first arrived in the Wilderness, they imagined living there might make them more sympathetic, better, more attuned people. But they came to understand there’d been a great misunderstanding about what better meant. It’s possible it simply meant better at being human, and left the definition of the word human up for interpretation. It might have only meant better at surviving, anywhere, by any means. Bea thought living in the Wilderness wasn’t all that different than living in the City in that respect.
The New Wilderness is set up like a dystopian cli-fi — people are crowded together into the smog-choked City, the last natural areas are patrolled by the power-crazed Rangers, both ruled over by the nebulous Administration — and the reader can tell by all of these capitalised nouns that things have gone very, very wrong in our not-so-distant future. Into this reality, an experiment is introduced: Twenty ordinary people are dropped into this last (and vast) natural area (called the Wilderness State), and following strict rules set out in their Manual (no settling in one place, clear each campsite of microtrash and cart it out, no splintering) and monitored and directed by the Rangers (who send the Community on foot to farflung Posts in order for them to receive and send mail, have their trash weighed and associated fines assigned, receive addendums to their Manual), the group must adopt a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in order to...something or other. Author Diane Cook has set up a pretty interesting concept — and the first few chapters had me very interested as I tried to figure out what was going on — but the whole thing is ultimately pretty pointless: The Community walks from Post to Post for years, eventually meeting Newcomers and Trespassers and other Mavericks (as the City becomes increasingly unlivable and people become desperate to break into what they believe to be a new Eden), but there’s never any insight into the politics or the climate events or the social changes that led to this point. For some reason, a population of unknown number had been corralled into a City of unknown size and twenty people have been given a chance to live a nomadic lifestyle under strict, and sometimes arbitrary, rules. Because of these rules (and other interferences by the Rangers, under orders of the Administration), the Community doesn’t organise itself organically (so there’s really no insight into how such a group might have actually lived at some point in our actual human history), and with only a few of the twenty serving as “main characters” (I don’t think I could name everyone in the Community even after just finishing this; why were there a couple of kids named Brother and Sister if they’re only mentioned maybe three times — and never doing anything important — over all the years covered in the book?), and with those main characters not necessarily behaving in ways I understood, Cook provides no real insight into how individual members of such a nomadic group might have survived. HOWEVER, despite not learning anything from The New Wilderness, and despite some frequently uninspired writing, this is not among the worst books I’ve ever read — it was fine. (But on the Man Booker shortlist? That I don’t understand.)
In the beginning there were twenty. Officially, these twenty were in the Wilderness State as part of an experiment to see how people interacted with nature, because, with all land now being used for resources — oil, gas, minerals, water, wood, food — or storage — trash, servers, toxic waste — such interactions had become lost to history. But most of the twenty didn’t know much about science, and many of them didn’t even care about nature. These twenty had the same reasons people have always had for turning their backs on everything they’d known and venturing to an unfamiliar place. They went to the Wilderness State because there was no other place they could go.
That’s about as much explanation as we get for this experiment, but we also know: Glen (probably an Anthropology Professor?) worked at a university, and when his stepdaughter, Agnes, became deathly sick from the air in the City, he championed the Wilderness experiment, and when it was approved, he, his wife Bea, and five-year-old Agnes were among the twenty dropped into the Wilderness State. The story begins several years into their experience (for some reason, no one keeps track of the months or the years as they pass, so we never know exactly how old Agnes is at any time) and the narrative alternates between third-party POV focussing on either Bea or Agnes. Bea is a survivor and a natural leader, and as the story goes along, she is prepared to do anything to protect her daughter — even if Agnes can’t seem to ever understand her mother’s rationale for anything. This mother-daughter relationship is really the heartbeat of the story, and by showing how hard Bea’s own mother fought to keep them in the City and away from the Wilderness State (and before that, how hard Bea’s grandmother — one of the last people to live in a private home — had fought being brought to the City when she could no longer care for herself), Cook develops this theme of mothers and daughters forever misunderstanding one another until their roles reverse; I did mostly like these bits, even though they could feel overwrought:
Agnes stiffened, withdrew her limbs, her self, and crawled back under the corner of the pelt, curled up. She did not want her mother’s aggressive overtures of love. She wanted her back rubbed, her cheek caressed. She wanted murmurs against her neck. Her hand held lightly. She wanted to not have to ask questions. To be confused. She wanted confessions she didn’t have to demand. She hated her mother’s fierce love. Because fierce love never lasted. Fierce love now meant that later, there would be no love, or at least that’s what it would feel like. Agnes wanted a mild mother, one who seemed to love her exactly the same every day. She thought, Mild mothers don’t run away.
I could go on and on about all the parts that just didn’t make sense, about clumsy writing and the lack of a through theme that made some kind of a point, but again, this was fine; I kept reading to the end because I wanted to know what was going to happen; I could almost even say that I was entertained.
The Man Booker 2020 Shortlist
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook
I've listed the titles in the order of my own enjoyment, and although my favourite from the longlist (Apeirogon by Colum McCann) didn't make the cut, I am not unhappy that Shuggie Bain won. This is the first time in years that I didn't try to read the longlist and I'm glad I didn't bother; what an uninspiring collection overall.
