All roads lead to Mom
The New Wilderness Diane Cook Harper
In The New Wilderness, Diane Cook’s unsettling but riveting debut novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, penthouses, lawns and swimming pools don’t exist anymore because they take up too much space. Everybody is crammed into soaring highrise blocks in the
City. No one goes outside except to go from one building to another. Citizens cannot travel outside the City, nor would they want to, and they count themselves lucky if they live near one of 10 gated trees, left over from a time when humanity lived more harmoniously with nature.
Lands outside the City, such as the Manufacturing Zone, the Mines and the Server Farms, have been requisitioned to serve the City’s needs. In this dystopian version of the United States, the only state that has escaped the utilitarian drive is the Wilderness State, a rewilded refuge for flora and fauna where humans aren’t allowed. The City, with its extreme pollution, is toxic to children, but hardly any doctors “worked on emergencies any more because there were no emergencies any more.”
When Bea’s five-yearold daughter, Agnes, won’t stop coughing up bloody phlegm, Bea realizes that unless she takes drastic action, her “frail, failing little girl” will die.
Along with a rag-tag group of 18 others — who “believed in some way their lives depended on it” — Bea and Agnes travel to the Wilderness State to become nomadic hunter-gatherers, as part of a controlled experiment, the particulars of which are shrouded in mystery, to see how people interact with nature. As the Community, they live according to draconian and arcane rules set out in the Manual, callously enforced by the Rangers, who exhort them to “Leave No Trace” and who, in turn, take orders from a faceless entity called the Administration.
Halfway through, the story changes to the daughter’s perspective
— a clever ploy by Cook. A meditation on mother-daughter relationships (and by extension, humanity’s relationship with Mother Nature) provides the emotional heft in this thrilling, allegorical tale, a cross between a nature documentary, ecological nightmare and reality survival show.