The epigraph to Diane Cook’s story collection Man v Nature is borrowed from Emily Dickinson’s correspondence, “The Wilderness is new — to you. Master, let me lead you.” This epigraph feels even more relevant to Cook’s debut novel, The New Wilderness, included on the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist. The novel is set in some apocalyptic future, where environmental erosion has pushed all of Earth’s residents to “the City”, an urban area filled with high rises and a population who is not able to leave their apartments due to the dangerously poor air quality (Sound familiar?). The novel centers around the experience of Bea and her daughter Agnes, who becomes dangerously ill as a result of this polluted air, forcing Bea and Agnes to join Bea’s husband Glen, a wilderness academic, to join a trial group of about 20 individuals trying to survive in the Wilderness State, an undeveloped natural landscape.
The group is sent to the Wilderness State with the express purpose of demonstrating how viable human existence would be in the wilderness, and the group is policed by a group of “Rangers”, tasked with making sure the group leaves no trace of their lives in the wilderness, moving constantly and never leaving a footprint on the environment. For many of these individuals, living in the wilderness is a necessity, as the city has become increasingly uninhabitable for children, while for other members of the group, like Glen and his student Carl, living in the wilderness is an exercise in academic curiosity and research. Cook carefully draws out the complicated social dynamics between the group and the Rangers, and the power dynamics within the group itself, which lends the imaginative novel an understandable social framework with which to view the characters in their environment.
But even more fascinating than the group social dynamic is the nuanced dynamic between mother and daughter. As Agnes, who is only eight years old at the onset of the narrative, begins to come of age, her interrogations of her mother becomes all the more interesting. Agnes’ young life is so shaped by her circumstances in the wilderness that it becomes extremely difficult for mother an daughter to relate to one another. Bea’s emotional distance from her daughter can be devastating to witness, and while she may blame this on her dominant survival instinct, it becomes hard to deduce what is survivalist and what is just deeply selfish and unfair. Bea is a very difficult character to relate to, and while Agnes’ upbringing would make her seem difficult for reader’s to understand, she is certainly the more charming and nuanced narrator.
Cook alarmingly captures the blunt everyday-ness of violence and death in nature, never emphasizing or dramatizing even the most difficult losses. With little to no fanfare, she describes brutal deaths caused by illness or physical injuries, her aloofness towards this violence very much mirroring her characters’. It becomes clear that the group living in the Wilderness State has been forced to detach themselves from loss and embrace the inevitability of death, as the loss of some group members is the only way for the remaining members to survive. The group’s commitment to survival necessitates that they abandon the privilege to mourn their losses, and view death with a sort of transactional lens while considering life as a zero sum game. This everyday violence feels especially hard to swallow in our current moment, with death tolls as a result of coronavirus rising past the hundred thousand mark and videos of police violence against black Americans on everyone’s social media feed, it feels especially important to recognize the ways we have desensitized ourselves to trauma and death.
Cook’s novel, written in the times before the pandemic, feels especially prescient in its apocalyptic nature. The New Wilderness fully leans into our cultural worst fears: that exploitative government bodies will precipitate the demise of our planet’s viability as a livable environment, that our loved ones aren’t safe and we cannot protect them, and the concept that classism will survive even after the ruination of our natural resources. Cook has written sharply and heartbreakingly about a family torn asunder by apocalypse, and an impossibly complicated mother daughter relationship placed under the toughest of circumstances. This novel is a powerful and expertly crafted assessment of the future if things continue on the path they are currently on, and while it is a fascinating read, it is up for the reader to decide how much additional emotional weight and anxiety in this age where there are no shortage of weight on our collective soul.
Further Reading: Diane Cook’s story collection Man v Nature hits many of the same notes as this novel, just in more bite-sized pieces.