Agnes comes to realise, too late, that “a mother would only be a mother for so long before she wanted to be something else”. It’s toughened her love into something desperate and darkly unyielding, which frustrates Agnes, who, having arrived in the Wilderness so young, is a natural tracker. Bea has had to negate the civilisation-loving part of herself in order to do what is right for her daughter. Halfway through, the story changes to the daughter’s perspective – a clever ploy by Cook. They copulate in full view of everyone, rutting like the elk whose pelts they turn into clothes. The threat from predators is constant, the passing of years marked only by the annual flowering of specific plants. Over the years, the Community’s precarious day-to-day existence is reduced to the hard-grind basics of dirt, blood, sweat and existential terror as their internecine power struggles turn atavistic. As the Community, they live according to draconian and arcane rules set out in the Manual, callously enforced by the Rangers, who exhort them to “Leave No Trace” and who, in turn, take orders from a faceless entity called the Administration. Because of overpopulation, emergencies were thought of more or less as fate.” When Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, won’t stop coughing up bloody phlegm, Bea realises that unless she takes drastic action, her “frail, failing little girl” will die.Īlong with a rag-tag group of 18 others – who “believed in some way their lives depended on it” – Bea and Agnes travel to the Wilderness State to become nomadic hunter-gatherers, as part of a controlled experiment, the particulars of which are shrouded in mystery, to see how people interact with nature. The City, with its extreme pollution, is toxic to children, but hardly any doctors “worked on emergencies any more because there were no emergencies any more. In this dystopian version of the United States, the only state that has escaped the utilitarian drive is the Wilderness State, a rewilded refuge for flora and fauna where humans aren’t allowed. Lands outside the City, such as the Manufacturing Zone, the Mines and the Server Farms, have been requisitioned to serve the City’s needs.
Citizens cannot travel outside the City, nor would they want to, and they count themselves lucky if they live near one of 10 gated trees, left over from a time when humanity lived more harmoniously with nature.
No one goes outside except to go from one building to another.
Everybody is crammed into soaring high-rise blocks in the City. In The New Wilderness, Diane Cook’s unsettling but riveting debut novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, penthouses, lawns and swimming pools don’t exist any more because they take up too much precious space.
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