Dystopia, plus bears

An allegorical epic about eco disaster is leavened with wit, discovers Dzifa Benson

ITHE NEW WILDERNESS by Diane Cook 416pp, Oneworld, £16.99, ebook £6.99

n 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 any more because they take up too much precious space. Everybody is crammed into soaring high-rise 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. Because of overpopulation, emergencies were thought of more or less as fate.” When Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, won’t stop coughing up bloody phlegm, Bea realises 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. Over the years, the Community’s precarious day-to-day existence is reduced to the hard-grind basics of dirt, blood, sweat and existential terror as their internecine power struggles turn atavistic. The threat from predators is constant, the passing of years marked only by the annual flowering of specific plants. They copulate in full view of everyone, rutting like the elk whose pelts they turn into clothes.

Halfway through, the story changes to the daughter’s perspective – a clever ploy by Cook. Bea has had to negate the civilisation-loving part of herself in order to do what is right for her daughter. It’s toughened her love into something desperate and darkly unyielding, which frustrates Agnes, who, having arrived in the Wilderness so young, is a natural tracker. Agnes comes to realise, too late, that “a mother would only be a mother for so long before she wanted to be something else”. It’s this meditation on mother-daughter relationships (and by extension, humanity’s relationship with Mother Nature) that provides the emotional heft in this thrilling, allegorical tale, a cross between a nature documentary, ecological nightmare and a Bear Grylls reality survival show.

The adolescent Agnes places The New Wilderness in the same constellation of apocalyptic novels as The Hunger Games and the Divergent series, although it is pitched at an older readership. Like those novels, it is soaked in rich imagery. The Community cross the length and breath of the continent several times – in fact, a few too many times, which slows the story. And although the novel could be cut by a third, we never find out why the City is so polluted or why Bea returns there for a year, leaving Agnes behind. When she returns to the Wilderness, Bea only vaguely sketches how much worse the City has become, which seems like a wasted opportunity. Crucially, given that half the narrative is related from her perspective, Bea’s story is not satisfactorily resolved.

At its best, however, The New Wilderness is bleakly compelling, and leavened by wry, sparkling humour that Cook combines seamlessly with existential dread. Take, for instance, the moment a bear raids the Community’s camp: “No one was hurt, but the bear refused to leave, luxuriating and s------- on their beds and trying to eat all their provisions.”

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REWILDING An American grizzly