Given the urgency of the climate crisis and the difficulties of changing our way of living to save the planet, it's no wonder that we can easily envision a time when nature has been plundered of its resources and humans are scrambling to survive. Diane Cook dramatises this conflict in “The New Wilderness” not by showing the fall of society but by presenting a group of people who've reverted to a nomadic life where survival is truly a day to day struggle. The majority of the population lives in an overpopulated and smoggy city where the air is so toxic children are often seriously ill. Because Bea's five year old daughter Agnes frequently coughed up blood and the doctors had no way of treating her, this mother and her partner Glen took the radical step to form a group of volunteers to venture out into the rural landscape which had been abandoned due to pollution. But this experiment is strictly regulated by the government and its rangers who study and regulate their existence. They're not allowed to settle in any location or leave any physical impact on the rewilding of the environment. The novel begins at a point where this group has been struggling to navigate this wilderness for some time and life has come to mean very little beyond the animal instinct to survive.
The trouble I had with this story is that I found it hard to buy into the structure and workings of its society. Dystopian fiction must build a plausible scenario through which its drama can proceed. Even if this isn't explicitly laid out there have to be logical indications of how society has come to this point. The negative impact humans are having on the environment is very real and with urban populations becoming so dense I can see why the author has set her novel up this way. But I struggled to get a sense for how society was being governed, the ways in which the wilderness was being so strictly regulated and why the volunteer group adhered to their rules. Of course, one of the elements of suspense is that there is a sinister government plan occurring in the background but I just didn't believe in the overall structure of how this society had come to operate. So I found it a challenge to emotionally invest in the plot or its characters. I also felt the plodding detail of their day to day lives wasn't engaging enough to make me feel the desperation and tension of their situation. There were occasionally moving scenes between the characters and creative observations about the hidden workings of the natural world, but overall the novel felt a little overlong and was a bit of a slog to get through.
I enjoyed the complicated way the story portrays motherhood. I felt the tension of Bea's genuine love for her daughter combined with the sometimes tedious obligations of it: “motherhood felt like a heavy coat she was compelled to put on each day no matter the weather.” The author shows the compelling and heart wrenching ways this parent-child bond is warped by the urgency of their circumstances. The story actually begins with Bea having a miscarriage. This grief must instantly be internalized because of pressing practical concerns and there is an emotional toll for this necessity. The same is true in how she relates to her daughter where the concept and practice of protecting one's child takes on a very different meaning. I became fascinated and felt engaged with the way that her daughter Agnes grows, develops and processes emotion herself. But it takes some time in the narrative to get to this point and after a while it didn't continue to strongly hold my interest. Overall I felt the impact of this novel's message got lost in a lack of clarity about this society's construction. So I was left questioning the author's creative choices rather than pondering the important issues at the heart of this book.
