Laurn Groff, The Vaster Wilds (Hutchinson Heinemann 2023)
If you picked this book up in a shop or the library and turned to page 76, these are the first two paragraphs you’d see:
By now, the twilight had begun to thicken, however; and she had to find some shelter before thick night came on full of its roving predators. She sensed that it would be a very cold night as well.
When she stood, she found she had a hard time moving swiftly; she was so stiff and sore from her long walk.
You might gather that this was a story about a woman alone in a wilderness. You might notice a couple of quirks in the language: ‘twilight had begun to thicken’ with its awkward echo of Lady Macbeth’s ‘Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood’; the slightly archaic feel of ‘roving predators’ and ‘swiftly’. You might surmise that the action of the novel takes place in the not very recent past.
By the end of the page, the character has found shelter, ‘a little black space carved out of the rock wall of a ridge’. The cave exhales ‘a strange and musty warmth’:
Something in her said to her that she must be cautious, and she made herself go slowly and silently. But soon the coldness of the night oncoming frightened her more than the cave with all its menacing unknowns. She ducked low into the black space and felt instantly that it would be warm enough and out of the melting wet at least. It smelled dank and thick in there. The darkness welled and seemed to pulse at the back of the cave.
More of the archaic feeling in the language, not so much in the vocabulary as in the cadence and word order: ‘Something in her said to her’, ‘the night oncoming’, ‘the melting wet’. And the surmised threat of roving predators of the first paragraph has become more immediate, though still intangible, in the dank, thick, pulsing darkness. On the strength of this page you might expect something like a novel equivalent of the TV series Alone. And you’d be mostly right.
The novel begins with a character, known only as ‘the girl’ for the first hundred pages or so, running through forest in what we come to understand is the North American continent in the late sixteenth century. She has been brought from england (the book spells all places and nationalities without initial capital letters) as a servant, and we learn that she has committed some great crime and is running to escape retribution.
A number of questions are raised early: what was the girl’s crime? will she escape her pursuers and avoid whatever attackers, human and otherwise, she might encounter (see cave above)? what are we to make of her assumption that the ‘people of this place’ are savages to be feared? will her Christian world view be affected by her experiences in the wilderness? will she find the safety, even the ‘saviour’, she hopes for? These questions create a forward impetus, and the girl’s gradually revealed back story fleshes out her character, but it’s the narration’s attention to the detail of her life in the wild that most engaged my attention.
It took me maybe a hundred pages to get over my irritation with the olde worlde language: I was going to say there are too many untos, then realised there was probably only one, but that is too many. Your mileage may vary. I was uneasy with the treatment of the Native Americans on the periphery of the narrative, but that unease was elegantly dealt with, first with humour when in a rare departure from the girl’s point of view a couple of Native children see her and fall abut laughing at her incompetence in their environment; and more sombrely in the final movement as she reflects on her possible misunderstanding of near-encounters.
I’m not a fan of the individual-against-the-wilderness genre, so I’m not really part of this book’s intended readership. I did finish it, partly because I was reading it for my Book Club and felt obliged. I can see that it’s a very good book, and I especially appreciate the way it uses the genre to probe at the roots of the genocidal encounters of colonisation, without having the heroine be adopted by a Native tribe. We’ve come a long way since Booran by M J Unwin, which I studied at school in 1962, or Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves.
The Book Club I read it for is the one that formerly banned any book-discussion that lasted more than 30 seconds, but has now become more conventional. It was paired with Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie. We had animated discussion of both books.
Me fail? I fly! 