Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness: Nature Mother (Environmental Book Review #5)

The New Wilderness

Diane Cook (Oneworld, 2020)

The mythical distinction between a wild, savage nature and controlled, safe human civilization has done much harm. It has inhibited our understanding of how humans are ever-present in nature, with the ongoing power to preserve or destroy it. It has also been the pretense for colonial and neo-colonial subjugation of Indigenous Peoples, whether by classifying people who live amongst nature as savages needing to be saved, or more recently in the exclusion of people from their historical lands and practices by classifying protected areas as unable to be touched by any people, regardless of how long they have lived there. Whatever distinction between humanity and nature can be found, it should not be used to ignore what humans do to nature wherever they are, or to prevent people from continuing a reasonable life in balance with the natural world around them.

It might be a related fact that nature doesn’t feature much in the best-know dystopian visions. A feature of the worlds of our nightmares is more often going to be environmental destruction and the lack of plants and animals, and some of the best-known dystopias feature vast cities, with the natural world blocked out by steel buildings and smoke. The Metropolis of Blade Runner has no space for nature whatsoever. In other contexts, nature is a kind of redemption, a hint that escape from the nightmare is possible. Katniss Everdeen briefly sneaks into nature and teaches herself to live among it, which is ultimately crucial to her outsmarting her various nemeses in The Hunger Games. All that is left in Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer is a polar bear peeking out from the snow, revealing that nature lives on after all. There isn’t much space in these worlds for ambivalence, for a complex emotional relationship with the natural world, to sometimes hate our dependence on it while loving it all the same.

In Diane Cook’s dystopia, we know of two places: The City, a crowded and polluted place with almost nothing living there apart from people, and the Wilderness State, where there are almost no people but there are trees, grasslands, birds, squirrels: the place is teeming with life. The people that do live there have opted into an experiment to live unsupported, faring for themselves instead in a group called the Community. Cook’s wonderful novel, which has been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, is about these people, and primarily about Bea, a mother struggling with the circumstances of moving to the Wilderness State, and her daughter Agnes.

Throughout the novel, the distinction between humanity and wilderness is dismantled. The Community is ambivalent about both the Wilderness and the City; both are dangerous and hostile, requiring similar instincts to survive. For many, it doesn’t seem as though the luxuries the City provides them are worth the dangers and distress of being there. They prefer life in the Wilderness despite the imminent threat of death and the scarcity of a nomadic lifestyle. The presence of creatures in the city is slowly revealed, with mentions of rats, raccoons and familiar city beasts painting a picture of a place not entirely lifeless. Likewise, the human presence in the Wilderness is clear. It is a place humans have created and stringently monitor through the “Rangers” who apply their rules to the Community more based on their own arbitrary whims than on some sense of consistency or genuine care for any environmental implications. It is also unclear that the values of society are much different in either place: Losses in the Wilderness are defined less by peoples’ humanity than by the utility they could provide to the survival of the whole, while in the City there is no sense that humanity or health are a priority. Over the course of the novel the structure of the group increasingly resembles a group of animals, eventually breaking down the distinction between people and the Wild almost completely. At many times people are more of a mystery than wild animals or the rhythms of nature, as inner thoughts stay unshared and decisions come from nowhere.

This false distinction between the wildness of nature and the human space of the City is also an oppressive construct. The Rangers impose an impossible standard on the Community of leaving the world they traverse “untouched”, taking away every joy the Community manufacture out of it themselves. Conversely, there is zero effort to ensure the environment in the City is preserved, with the quality of air endangering children and the final trees barely hanging on with humans unable to come close to them. There are, however, no easy answers. The people in Cook’s world are desperately trying to re-discover the place of humanity in the natural world, but that doesn’t mean they will find it.

I did find myself asking whether this is a realistic depiction of our future. The details of the dystopia are never really fleshed out, with the reader left with implications of a totalitarian society (ruled by some kind of “Administration”) and some environmental problems much more front and centre than others: resource constraints are clearly biting and air pollution has become a major issue, but climate change goes essentially unmentioned and doesn’t appear to have much impact on the Wilderness State, which has regular seasons and snowfalls. There isn’t much sense of what has happened in the wider world beyond the City and the Wilderness apart from some indication that most people have been moved into the City as more land is needed for production. What the role of technology is in the society isn’t clear beyond the apparently complete ability of the Rangers to understand what the Community is doing.

However, this lack of information is largely the point. Bea and Agnes are not powerful people but very ordinary. Bea is mostly interested in her sanity and the survival of her daughter, and Agnes is barely old enough to remember life beyond the Wilderness. We see the world through their eyes, and it is a world where people are starved of knowledge and left to fend with what they can learn by interacting with their immediate surroundings. This society has its myths, such as the “Private Lands” which sound like a nostalgic version of our present. In the end the details are vague enough that you could project whatever nightmare vision you want (even, say, one where the destruction of nature has unleashed a deadly virus meaning most people must stay inside and not interact with others) and it would still work. The beauty is the depiction of how ordinary people would struggle in that world, how environmental carnage would exacerbate the controls placed on people and the manipulation of information by the powerful to oppress the powerless.

But the more extraordinary thing is that all of this is not even the best the book has to offer. Environmental catastrophe may be an ever-present reality in the novel, but its higher concern is the painful complexities of the love between Bea and Agnes and the ways in which mothers and daughters hurt and redeem one another. The book begins with Bea having a miscarriage of a potential second daughter, and her inability to reconcile her grief with the immediate needs of the people around her defines the first part of the book. Meanwhile Agnes juggles her own resentment at her mother’s choice to bring her to the Wilderness State with the evident sense she now belongs to the place. This juggling of competing feelings between mothers and daughters gives the book its major narrative drive, and numerous moments of raw emotional power. On more than one occasion I was almost brought to tears as Cook peeled back the layers of the women’s pain. These struggles are not dependent on Bea and Agnes’ place in the Wilderness State: they could be the struggles of any single mother and daughter negotiating difficult circumstances in which to flourish.

For all its emotional power, the novel is mostly unsentimental. Cook doesn’t give in to any of the desires of the reader, with people more often being built up to let you down. Many questions are left unresolved, with the only choices left to the characters consistently being to love the ones they have to love, and to resist the rules imposed on them as much as they can get away with. We can’t pretend we aren’t a part of nature or that we completely dominate it: Cook’s novel illustrates the pain that can come from pretending otherwise.