The New Wilderness (2020)
Diane Cook (1976)
398 pages
An enduring fantasy in reaction to the challenges of modern life has been that of escaping to a form of living more closely aligned with the rhythms of the natural world. It can be easy to imagine that exchanging the concrete dissatisfactions of one’s daily life for the seeming simplicity of a more rustic existence could be a worthwhile trade. But is this perhaps rather more a case of needing to be careful what one wishes for?
In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a couple of dozen people make precisely this choice, volunteering to leave their established lives behind and move to an uninhabited area to live off the land as nomads. Nominally taking part in a study on the impact of people on the wilderness, the group, known as the Community, must follow strict guidelines outlined in a book called the Manual; to ensure they leave no impact beyond taking what’s needed for food, clothing and shelter, a team of Rangers closely monitors their activities.
Cook motivates the situation by setting the story in a not-too-distant future of worsening ecological conditions and growing economic disruption. She implicates a combination of global warming and increasing pollution as the culprits but leaves ambiguous the origins and extent of what has happened to the world. The members of the Community make clear, however, that they had found their lives, in a place referred to simply as the City, becoming increasingly intolerable, and so had eagerly embraced joining the study and moving to a region called the Wilderness State.
The novel opens several years into the Community’s time in the wilderness, by which point they have already lost several members, with some dying in accidents and others giving up and returning to the City. The group has also worn out most of its original clothing and equipment, settling into a life of producing what they need out of what they can make for themselves from hunting and gathering. Along with the ongoing challenges of the natural world, however, they also find themselves repeatedly at odds with the Rangers, whose aggressive tracking of the Community’s impact on the Wilderness State represents a constant irritation for the Community, never allowing it to settle down or find peace.
Within the broader context of these daily challenges faced by the Community in the Wilderness State, the story develops around the relationship of two its members, Bea and her nine-year-old daughter Agnes. Agnes had grown up sickly, her body unable to cope with the heavily polluted air in the City. When her stepfather, a professor of archeology, learns of plans for a study involving a group living in the wilderness, he and Bea decide to volunteer in the hope that the fresh air will offer Agnes a chance to become healthy.
Now, four years later, Agnes only dimly remembers her former life in the city; she has grown up in the Wilderness State and feels comfortable and in-tune with the nature around her. For Bea, however, life in the wilderness with the Community has been a mixed blessing: though happy that her daughter has become healthy, she misses her own mother terribly and remains conflicted about the sacrifices she’s made, reflecting that although “she loved Agnes fiercely, … motherhood felt like a heavy coat she was compelled to put on each day no matter the weather.” (18)
Agnes, for her part, recognizes this ambivalence within her mother. Late in the novel, when the two are speaking about Agnes’ childhood, Agnes realizes that “she didn’t need her mother to tell her that it was both nice and not nice to have a child. It was always there on her face.” (327)
Too young, however, to make sense of her mother’s feelings – and her mother unwilling to explain them – Agnes struggles to understand her mother’s choices and behavior. In the structured life of the City this may have led to the typical kind of mother-daughter drama, boiling at or near the surface, until eventually Agnes would have grown up and moved away. But here, Bea’s cryptic behavior leaves Agnes ever more trapped between her love for her mother and a deepening alienation from her, exacerbated by Agnes’ own growing connection to and harmony with the natural world. With the engagement and cooperation of the entire Community required in the constant struggle to survive, the estrangement between the two inexorably comes to a head.
The disastrous environmental changes that define the world of the novel have apparently occurred in the relatively recent past and seem to have worsened quickly. While Bea describes her mother as having grown up in a house and community that seems very much like our present day, she herself seems to have no direct memory of that time. Even her familiarity with the current world outside the City and the Wilderness State seems surprisingly limited, as if the ongoing environmental and social decline has narrowed her focus down to her local, daily life – or, more ominously, has been actively curtailed by the ruling elite, through a government referred to cryptically as the Administration. Thus, when Bea and Agnes one day see geese at a pond near which the Community has settled, and Agnes asks whether there are geese in other places:
Bea assumed there must be geese elsewhere, just not in the City. But now she didn’t know. And what of those other lands in heavy use? The cities of greenhouses, the rolling landfills, the sea of windmills, the Woodlots, the Server Farms. What of the lands that had long ago been abandoned? The Heat Belt, the Fallow Lands, the New Coast. (79-80)
This uncertainty is reflected too, in the repeated speculation among the members of the Community about rumored Private Lands, where those rich enough to avoid the deteriorating conditions in the City supposedly live in clean and comfortable conditions.
Cook’s ambiguousness about the origins of this dystopian future and its full implications recalls her approach to many of the wonderful stories in her collection Man V. Nature, which I described in my review (linked to at right) as a delightfully strange brew. In those stories, like that of The New Wilderness, Cook introduced a dystopic alternate reality or future without revealing much about its causes or full implications – dropping a reader into a kind of Twilight Zone setting. As was done in that old TV series, Cook focuses more in her stories on exploring the reactions of the characters to the world in which they find themselves, the impact on their lives and relationships, rather than explaining how that world came about.
The New Wilderness: the world that Cook creates supports the psychological drama that plays out but seems distractingly improbable. Certainly, dystopian stories that leave the details of their origins hazy or even completely undefined are legion – in author Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight, as a particularly extreme case, the main character finds himself alone at an Arctic outpost with no hint at all of what has happened to the outside world beyond that he appears to be the last remaining survivor (my review linked to at right); Brooks-Dalton leaves what has happened to the rest of the world completely to the reader’s imagination.
For Harari’s bleak, if startlingly plausible view of our future, the world of Cook’s novel, with its increasingly dysfunctional City and mythical Private Lands, seems a disturbingly fitting and all too imminent waypoint.
Other notes and information:
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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