Doug's Reviews > The New Wilderness

From the description, I probably would not have been enticed into reading this ecological fable cum dystopian novel, were it not for its inclusion on this year's Booker longlist. And although the first few pages seemed promising, the further in I got, the more disenchanted I became. In an interview, the author is quoted as saying: "Many days, writing would feel like a slog just to get a few pages down while barely making a dent in the overall draft. There were still so many more pages to go. So I wrote with an outline for the first time. It was necessary in order to remind me I had somewhere I was trying to get to.", and I must say that feeling of trudging through molasses infects the reader also - and that outline didn't seem to help much, since a clear through-line never develops and there are several hundred pages devoted to slogging though the wilderness rather aimlessly.

The 'world building' required for a really interesting explication of the issues the author apparently wished to address around climate change, man's animalistic nature, and the mother-daughter bond, is woefully underdeveloped. We never get any concrete sense of exactly what the experiment at the heart of the book is for, nor who the Rangers are, nor what has happened to have led to there only being a small area of wilderness left. Although ambiguity has its place, at times I felt like a Kafka protagonist, trying to work out meaningless tasks set by a faceless administration.

The lack of an exciting plot might have been forgiven if it weren't for some issues with both characterization and the prose style. Only the central characters of the mother and daughter, as well as a mere handful of the others are clearly defined - the rest blur into an undifferentiated, one-dimensional mass. And while the daughter Agnes more or less 'makes sense', mother Bea seems all over the map, with contradictory behavior that I think is intended to render her complicated and complex - but just makes her ... contradictory ... and unlikeable.

Sloppiness abounds - Agnes is 8 at the beginning of the book, and then about a year later, starts to menstruate, which, given her age and the fact that she is seriously malnourished and underweight seems highly unlikely. Her scalp gets shaved when she smears it with sap, and then a few months later, another pioneer gives her a second haircut, complaining she is getting shaggy and her hair will reach her waist soon - when it would have been hard pressed to have grown more than an inch or two.

The dialogue is stilted and clichés are rampant (e.g., 'her heart skipped a beat'). I understand the author has been hired to turn this into a screenplay, but I pity the actors trying to make her dialogue sound natural and realistic, or really anything other than hokey. A resounding error from this year's Booker judges, who sidestepped quite a few eminently worthier entries.