“They had seen a lot of death. They had become hardened to it. Not just the Community members who had perished in grisly or mundane ways. But around them everything died openly. Dying was as common as living.”
The New Wilderness, Diane Cook’s Booker-longlisted debut novel, is an urgent and inventive look at the climate crisis. Set in an eerily believable near-future, the book charts the progress (heavy on the irony) of a group of volunteers who’ve signed up to an experiment where they live in a vast area of wilderness outside the bounds of the City, a place of contaminated air and depleted natural resources.
We first meet the group some years into the experiment, as they trek from one outpost to the next under vague instructions from rangers. Questions are barely tolerated, little context is given. A sense of uncertainty and dread hangs over proceedings as they move pointlessly, and therefore relentlessly, across forests, playas, mountain ranges and lakes.
There is a purgatorial feel to the novel, which is hugely appropriate to its subject matter. Cook doesn’t spell it out – she is a subtle writer who eschews the dramatic – but beneath the events of this ecological horror story, the point is clear: humans will soon pay for the damage being done in the present day.
Cook has the control that is necessary for good speculative fiction. Her debut short story collection, Man v Nature, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. From New York, she is also a recipient of a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and her stories have been widely published.
In Man v Nature the author created vividly uncanny worlds where her characters battled against malevolent forces that were often of their own creation. In one story, The Not-Needed Forest, a group of boys took their unexpected freedom and went full-on Lord of the Flies.
By contrast, The New Wilderness offers a more considered version of this same story: human beings struggling to survive against the elements do what they can for each other, but crucially that “can” gets diminished over time. There are no dramatic cannibalism moments, just the sad reality that people die easily in the wilderness and there is no point endangering more lives by trying to help them. Even loved ones are best forgotten.
Primal instincts
Although set in the near future, the success of the novel is that Cook returns her characters to a Neanderthal age where primal instincts rule supreme. The human struggle at the heart of this is made clear through a subset within the group: mother Bea, her pre-teen daughter Agnes and Bea’s partner Glen. The latter seems important in the beginning but fittingly fades as the years go by. He lacks the blood connection of Bea and Agnes, the animal instinct of the maternal bond.
From the opening pages, this connection is made wonderfully clear. Bea gives birth to a dead baby, christens the child, and then buries her alone. As she sets to her work – and it does come across in functional terms – she remembers watching a deer in the wilderness give birth:
“There were few things Bea let herself regret these days, these unpredictable days full of survival so plain and brute. But she wished she had walked another way that night, not found their eyes in her light, so that the doe could have had her birth, nuzzled and licked her baby clean, could have had the chance to give her baby a first unblemished night before the work of survival began.”
Survival and motherhood are intrinsically linked throughout. The ambivalent love between Agnes and Bea gives the book great tension. There is quiet humour in the pair’s bickering and outbursts, which seem so insignificant (yet also so critical) against the mammoth task of surviving in the wilderness.
Cook gives both perspectives, cleverly switching into Agnes’ voice just as we begin to feel contempt for her precocious ways. For Bea, motherhood sometimes feels “like a heavy coat she was compelled to put on each day no matter the weather”. But Agnes, who embodies the spirit of the book, takes her cues from the natural world where she grows up: “Agnes had noticed that a mother would only be a mother for so long before she wanted to be something else. No mother she’d ever watched here remained a mother forever.”
There are desperate leavings and reunions, love and hate in equal measure, and the brutality of the wilderness, the only place they can really call home, is matched by the fierceness of their feelings for another.
This quietly raging novel deserves its place on the Booker longlist. People who switch off when they hear the phrase “climate change” should read it. And so should everyone else.
