This week I have read The New Wilderness by Diane Cook from the Booker Prize Shortlist 2020, a dystopian fiction of environmental destruction and survival. Volunteering for an experiment in leaving ‘no trace’, the characters in the ‘Wilderness State’ exist as a collective ‘Community’ of nomadic hunter-gatherers. The narrative is centred on the mother-daughter relationship between Beatrice, who agrees to enter the experiment with the promise of better health for her daughter, Agnes, who is dying from poison ‘City’ air.
The New Wilderness presents the impending doom of environmental destruction, not as an anticipated event, but one that has already occurred. Written in five parts: ‘The Ballad of Beatrice; In the Beginning; The Big Walk; The Ballad of Agnes and Friend or Foe’, the third person narration is able to effectively shift perspectives from Beatrice to Agnes, exploring the depth and divisions of their relationship. The shift to Agnes’ narrative works particularly well as an exploration a younger generation’s collective responsibility of a respectful existence in the wake of the older generation’s individualistic greed and disregard for the natural world. Small revelations alongside Agnes’ maturation allow her an insight into Beatrice, although Agnes herself has forged an almost animalistic bond with the land and thereby establishing a greater divide between herself and her mother.
The social commentary on the ever-decreasing natural resources pervades the novel. The rich description of the natural world where the landscape is described as ‘grasslands that smelled of nutmeg after a rain’ is juxtaposed with images of the ‘City’ with poison air and the ‘streets were crowded, filthy, where rows of high-rises sprawled to the horizon and beyond.’ While these two environments seemingly co-exist, it raises the question of whether the filth and sprawl of the ‘City’ is unstoppable and if the ‘Wilderness State’, last vestige of the natural world, is doomed. David Attenborough addresses this very idea in the documentary ‘A Life on Our Planet’, and while our destruction is irrefutable, he does give a sense that we can still, collectively, enact change, whereas The New Wilderness leaves us wondering if only a few are actually destined to survive – a rather hopeless thought.
The twenty original members of the ‘Wilderness State Community’ were not scientists, naturalists or environmentalists; they were twenty volunteers who gave up everything because this experiment was their last option. They quickly lose most of the technological trappings of modern society, keeping time by the seasons and flowers with the effect that their existence seems to be in sync with the ‘wild world’. This is echoed in the ‘Manual’ which dictates the rules including the ‘bags of their garbage they carried with them to be weighed and disposed of by the Rangers at Post’. The drive towards ‘no trace’ is seemingly impossible as the group complete ‘micro trash sweeps’ to completely encourage ‘re-wilding’. Additionally, the role of the Rangers is not clearly defined as they seem to function solely to deliver post and provide the group with the next set of instructions. The fact that the ‘Community’ makes use of rope, bedding, cookware and steals processed food from the Post seems to contradict the notion that the ‘Community’ should be living off of the land as primitive hunter-gathers and makes one question the nature of the experiment.
The group continually evaluate what is necessary, carrying the ‘forty-pound cast-iron pot’ through the Wilderness and the ‘Book Bag’ which once contained ‘the Book of Fables’ but ‘had been lost to a flash flood’. Both seem almost farcical as the group ‘were limited to seven days in one place’ and carrying the cast-iron pot across the ‘Wilderness State’ is nothing short of madness. With Agnes growing up with little memory of the ‘City’, her skills of survival are finely tuned over the years and her instincts lead her to ‘follow the animals’ to find water and declares herself ‘I’m a leader’ when having to negotiate with the Rangers. While some of the older members of the ‘Community’ struggle to adapt to the de-evolved existence, those young enough or born in the Wilderness State are almost wild animals themselves.
The shift in relationships between the remaining original twenty of the ‘Community’ is not unexpected and Beatrice, a natural leader, vies with Carl, ‘the true hunter of the Community’, with Glen and Agnes sidelined. As with any dystopian survival story, it is survival of the fittest, and Glen lingers as a weak link throughout although he ‘was the one who knew about the study’ and was key in securing their place in the experiment. The result is that Beatrice’s relationships are volatile, and you wonder how long Beatrice, Glen and Carl can survive the three-way relationship in the pressure cooker of survival.
When Agnes reaches thirteen years old, The New Wilderness sets her up for the expected teenage conflicts with Beatrice, on their journey to nowhere in the nature reserve. Circling the ‘Wilderness State’, from ‘Post to Post’, with self-taught survival skills, it is unbelievable when Beatrice, on discovery that her own mother had died in the City, is overcome with guilt and remorse in leaving her, dramatically departs to see to ‘Nana’s affairs’ without even a good-bye. Prompted by ‘a loud bellowing horn’ Beatrice ‘smoothed down her hair ‘and announced, ‘I have to go’ and moved ‘mechanically’ towards the tanker truck. Beatrice is described as ‘in this moment she would do anything to leave this place’. Beatrice’s whole reasoning for bringing Agnes into the ‘Wilderness State’ was to save her, a supreme act of motherly love, it is therefore, confounding when she abruptly leaves Agnes and Glen. This lays the foundations for further conflicts between Agnes and Beatrice, propelling Agnes into her first real relationship with Jake, a newcomer to the Wilderness, who unfortunately seems to remain in the background.
While The New Wilderness is less clear on how the ‘Community’ made the shift from average urban unskilled city dwellers to skilled nomadic hunter-gathers with only a ‘Manual’ for guidance, the relationship between Beatrice and Agnes successfully drives the narrative. As a dystopian novel, it harnesses the expected tropes of the perfect place in the elusive ‘Private Lands’, societal control of the microcosm of the ‘Wilderness State’ with a battle between individualism and the collective as well as the ever-present threat to survival of both the ‘Community’ and the natural world. Dystopian fiction is one of my favourite genres, however, the characters here seem anaesthetised to some of the more truly tragic events of the narrative. This may indeed reflect the survival of the fittest mentality needed to exist in the ‘Wilderness State’ but I would have liked the members of the ‘Community’ to have conveyed a greater sense of compassion for each other, especially given the length of time they were together, and in turn cultivated greater sympathy on the part of the reader. The journey through The New Wilderness begs us to reflect on our own imprint on our natural world and take action before it is too late.
Themes: mother-daughter relationships, environment, climate change, pollution, nature preservation, survival, choice, miscarriage, parenting, individualism, collectivism.
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