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Instead, she falls in love with Nathaniel Bonner, known to the local Indians as ‘Between-Two-Lives’ for the way he moves between the white and red worlds. Despite her determination to remain single, her father has lined up a marriage for her with the local doctor. She plans to start a school where she can teach all the local children. Synopsisĭecember 1792, Elizabeth joins her father at his home in the New York wilderness.
#Into the wilderness book review full#
Please see our full disclosure for further information. To order a copy go to post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission, at no extra cost to you, if you make a purchase through a link. The New Wilderness by Diane Cook is published by Oneworld (£16.99). What lingers, though, beyond the awesome power of Bea and Agnes as heroines, is pure wonderment at all in this world of ours that is not human.
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So much else is broached in these vivid, timely pages: tribalism, courage, consumption, storytelling itself – an art that Cook spirits back to its spark-enlivened, campfire origins. Her wild girl observations and lack of inhibition can be at once humorous and lightly menacing, as when the plump legs of a woman freshly arrived from the City make her hungry.ĭoes living amid nature make the Community into better human beings? Certainly not in any way that the Romantics would have recognised. Yet it is through Agnes’s eyes that the bulk of this supremely well-crafted adventure unfolds. Mercurial and increasingly desperate to protect Agnes, Bea is destined to become their leader, attaining a quasi-folk-hero status. The push-pull ambivalence of Bea and Agnes’s bond forms its beating heart. She doesn’t once use that hoary phrase “Mother Nature”, but it hovers all the same over a novel in which motherhood and the mother-daughter relationship – its sacrifices, its limitations, its elemental, consuming love – are pivotal.
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Here, too, it’s what we do to nature and what nature does to us that absorbs her. It’s this that provides the novel’s engine, powering a propulsive narrative in which they must weather power struggles, appease the Wilderness rangers and absorb newcomers, all without knowledge of what is happening beyond the border.Ĭook, a former producer of the cult radio programme This American Life, is the author of the acclaimed short story collection, Man v. Agnes, though, is thriving and at one with a fierce, savagely beautiful environment that has already proven fatal to half their original group of 20.Įven amid the daily struggle for survival, their fear is that the study will come to an end and they’ll be sent back to the city.
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Or how, utterly delusional about what lay ahead, they made pancakes for breakfast over the campfire on their very first morning.Īfter eating only what they’re able to forage and hunt with bows and arrows, the Community has grown bony, ravaged by the sun and hardened by experience. Like how the Community all used to have 10 fingers and toes. For all its horror, it’s an understated moment – there is no keening lament, just cricket song and the soft tread of coyotes.Ĭook is adept at matter-of-factly deploying unadorned detail to deadpanning, gut-plummeting effect. Cook is adept at matter-of-factly deploying unadorned detail to deadpanning, gut-plummeting effectĪt the novel’s start, they have been in the Wilderness for three years and its harrowing opening scene tells you all you need to know about the extreme toll it’s taken: alone, Bea crouches with her stillborn baby, covering her with wilted leaves and sagebrush branches. Sinister allusions to uninhabitable regions such as “the Heat Belt”, and to the fact that doctors no longer choose to specialise in paediatrics, sharpen a picture of a planet brought to its knees by the human race and of a human race at the “precipitous end” of its timeline. Any unbuilt-upon land has been harnessed to service a swollen population bunkered down in overcrowded high-rises, creating plains of greenhouses, seas of windmills, rolling landfills. Helped by Bea’s partner, an academic who is also part of “the Community”, they signed up because five-year-old Agnes was being poisoned by polluted air back in a megalopolis known only as “the City”.