Henk's Reviews > The New Wilderness

Uneven and underwhelming, and I really like dystopian fiction as a genre.
Nothing in this novel hasn’t already been done better (and with humor) by Margaret Atwood in the MaddAddam trilogy
Of course they were different from deers, but not as different as they had always imagined - about leaving someone behind

I don't think I ever compared a Booker shortlisted book with an unspectacular version of The Hunger Games but The New Wilderness invoked this thought quite early on while reading. An other comparison that came to mind, due to a lack of technology and a focus on survival skills, was The Clan of the Cave Bear.
Both comparisons are not the most literary of works, but still this book manages to fall short when sized up against those novels.

Give me modern day life
Its not that those losses weren’t difficult its just that loss was now a part of daily life as so many new things were.

Bea (mother) and Agnes (daughter) are, together with 18 others, dropped in an unspecified wilderness state. As reader we are thoroughly reminded that the wilderness is not an idyllic state but a brutal place where death can simply be referred to as ceased surviving.
And there is a lot of that in the first part of the book, here Diane Cook successfully manages to conjure a feeling of a world wherein teacups and ropes as vestiges of civilization seem more important than a human life.
How does one not go numb in such circumstances and is there really a community with so much deaths? And why is a stillborn, where the book kicks off with, such a big deal in a community hardened by everyday loss?

Slowly and surely as we plow through the 400 plus pages, the sense of place and environment description simply don't cut it anymore. The community is forced to move, not to live sedentary, by rangers who keep watch on them and herd them as cattle. There are arcane rules to force the 11 people remaining after 5 years to reduce their environmental impact. Meanwhile adherence to said rules is checked by rangers in trucks inspecting them.
Chapter 2 is an small infodump on why Agnes needed to leave the city (bad lungs, fortunately air pollution doesn't travel, even though the city is omnipresent in this not to far future) and how Bea felt about this when she just became an interior designer.
if anything it made me think back of The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 and how Lionel Shriver much more convincingly paints the portrait of societal collapse and what this means for everyday people.

More and more I got the feeling I was reading the literary equivalent of Utopia, a Dutch reality TV show of strangers put together in an abandoned enclosed field, with the task of building a society. They were filmed all the time and as one can expect the result was quite boring so the network introduced stuff to incite drama and in the end staged a finale because otherwise not much would happen.
Cooks approach is similar, from chapter 3 we have a kind of gorilla man inciting some conflict, later on the rangers force the community to move around on absurdly long marches (if these people even move 10km per day the wilderness is more than 1.800 km across), there are some newcomers, an unexplained dead, a surprise escape, some fabled Elysium movie like lands where everything is oke...
The whole world building and plot is a mess and in the end I can only say I did like the end because fortunately that part was not as spun out as the intermediate parts.

Mother and daughter
And she loved Agnes fiercely though motherhood felt like a heavy coat she was compelled to pull on each day, no matter of the weather

One thing the book does get right, even though I wanted to shake Agnes quite a lot of times for her seeming incapacity to just try to talk to her mom, is the mother daughter relationship. Sure, Bea is rather erratic and as said Agnes is very teenager like, all in her own point of reference, but there are real moments of warmth and emotion here. Like being cultural so far removed that you need to ask your daughter if she remembers pizza, cheese, tomatoes. Or the illness of her stepfather and the impact of this on the little family.
Pain comes back as well, because basically Bea gave up her modern day city life (and trust me, after this book you will not want to miss you shower, refrigerator, health insurance, central heating and rule of law) for Agnes her health. Conversely, she does something rather unsympathetic around 40% in the book that leaves Agnes wondering how far the motherly love goes.

The rest of the characters are, despite Agnes continually muttering on about not understanding humans, rather cardboard like. Maybe it doesn't help that Cook doesn't seem to imbue them with any other curse word than fuck. And I can hardly imagine how people fight over power when they are with 7 adults or something, what even is power then besides controlling the food rations? The level of apathy is rather high, the psychopath/protohitler guy is largely left unchecked but around 60% in the book is just appeased with some sex...
It again makes you wonder about the world, why are people not psychologically screened or selected on any skills before being send to the Wilderness State? Why are people so woefully unprepared, certainly taking into account the exploits of the first group are apparently televised in the City.
Why don’t they just kill the ranger in chapter 6, after such a time of complete freedom?
What even are they (or the author for that matter) working towards to?

Concluding thoughts
It’s better to miss something you can’t have than think there is nothing worth missing.

One can read in The New Wilderness a parable on being a refugee (and how we all will be in a world more and more ravaged by climate change). Or a warning how extreme circumstances lead people to believe in the cultus of extroverts and storytellers, demagoguery.
But the execution is just not convincing.
And Agnes becomes very annoying in the concluding chapters, she is channeling a child who doesn’t want to move to a new school and sees that move as the end of the world. Plus she thinks she can outdo the native Americans and just hide for encroaching sedentary life, when the number of people and technology against her are staggering.

The convoluted and rambling plot just sucks the air out of what this book could have said and meant. On to the other Booker nominees, or even better, just a good Margaret Atwood novel.