"The New Wilderness" by Diane Cook

 

In The New Wilderness Diane Cook explores the sometimes fraught relationship between a mother Bea, and her daughter, Agnes. She plays this relationship out on a dystopian landscape, stripped of all modernity’s distractions. She warns us about mismanaging our home planet and simultaneously lays human nature and human interaction open to review and judgment. The author celebrates and grieves over the eternal give and take between mother and daughter; Cook tackles this essential chore brilliantly, showing all its depth and tenderness, and not sparing us the painful moments. In fact, she handles this volatile relationship so perfectly that the novel was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.

Bea gives birth to Agnes in the City, and like so many children in that toxic, dangerous pit, she becomes critically ill, to the level of coughing up blood. Desperate, Bea and her husband Glen win passes to join a group of like-minded pilgrims and leave the City permanently behind, and make their collective way in the Wilderness State. The Wilderness State is a vast tract of natural environment—free of the devastation that has left the City uninhabitable. This group, called the Community, generally succeeds at living off the land. Yes, they run afoul a few times of the Rangers, the formal authority over the Wilderness State, but things don’t really spiral out of control until other groups violate the borders of this reserve, after which daily subsistence becomes too much of a challenge.

Cook’s kernel remains Bea and Agnes. Other plot directions orbit this way and that, but Bea and Agnes continually return front and center. The author always portrays these two women with such logic, such love, and, after Agnes grows to approximate independence, at high stakes loggerheads—it simply isn’t possible that it could have been handled any more fairly, or with any more love or mercy.

The author crafts her love story in admirable and direct prose. Speech and reasoning within the group progresses in blunt terms, because decisions have direct consequences when you’re a migrant group living off the land. There’s no higher power, no magisterial narrator to describe beautiful scenes, or give hints about advisable survival strategies, which is exactly how it should be.

The book contains at length a subtle hint at a higher symbolism, but I won’t speculate about it, because I think it would remain a minor feature, and not a very influential one. But if you sit down to this book, it will take you on a journey through human nature in the face of the natural world, and plot out for you the parabola of love’s trajectory of two willful women, tied together by love. Memorable and merciful, true to life and thought-provoking, the Booker committee was right to honor this one. A true winner.