USA TODAY International Edition
‘ New Wilderness’ tells timely tale of our ecology
Been to a national park recently? There’s a feeling when, trees at your back and songbirds above, human stresses ( like pandemics) seem to fall away. In the United States, whose limited wild spaces are increasingly under threat from pollution and overcrowding, access to wild calmness is becoming a scarce resource. Diane Cook’s inspired debut novel “The New Wilderness” ( Harper, 416 pp., imagines a future in which the wilderness itself has become invite- only.
Most of the country’s population lives in the City, where thick smog has brought Bea’s little daughter, Agnes, to the brink of death.
Desperate, Bea volunteers them to join the few pioneers sent into the Wilderness State, the last remaining area of natural land. They live a grand experiment, roving the plains like early humans, leaving no trace behind as they hunt and gather.
Agnes is able to breathe again as they become attuned to the earth, gaining intuitive sense of the meanings of animal calls or subtle changes in the landscape.
Over the months, the group comes closer to their animal selves. “Of course, they were different from deer. But not as different as they had always imagined.”
To Bea’s relief, Agnes thrives in this wild land, becoming a key member of the tribe despite her young age. She is fluent in the ways of the natural world – but this primitive life comes harder to Bea. This is not a romantic tale of getting back to basics. In Cook’s masterful hands, there are no easy answers to the question of whether humans can actually revert to their wild selves.
The tribe suffers mightily, losing members to natural disasters and animal attacks, and through it all, Cook tests our notions that there is any special purity or nobility to the wilderness. As Bea notes, there “used to be a cultural belief, in an era before she was born, that having close ties to nature made one a better person.” But in the wild, people become neither better nor worse – only more human.
They leave traces when they’re instructed to leave none, and are game to hop a ride on a truck along the boundary of the Wilderness State if it’s convenient. “The New Wilderness” seems to argue that it is this willingness to ditch guidelines in the name of personal advantage that is the essence of humanity, whether one lives in the City or the Wilderness State.
That’s all secondary to the true, transcendent heart of this novel: the evolving and ever- surprising relationship between Bea and Agnes. Through miscarriages, abandonments, rescue and murder, the bond between mother and daughter breaks and mends in remarkable and moving ways. Although the group would seem to have ultimate freedom, loosed from the strictures of society, they are all the same animals in a large pen, policed by park rangers and at the mercy of human civilization swarming outside. The connection between Agnes and Bea is tested to the limit when these larger forces challenge the existence of the Wilderness State itself.
A gripping adventure that denies its readers easy answers, “The New Wilderness” is an important debut, and an illuminating read in these times, when the stakes of humans’ relationship with nature have never felt higher.