Cautionary tale of a world in ruin

In her debut novel The New Wilderness, American author Diane Cook imagines a world so ravaged by climate change, with overpopulated cities smothered in smog and overrun by pests, that mankind is forced to explore living in the wild.

The Booker Prize-shortlisted novel centres on a band of volunteers, the Community, who opt to join an experiment - the purpose of which is never fully explained - to live a nomadic life in the Wilderness State, a vast, inhospitable zone of pristine landscape.

These urban refugees, left to fend for themselves, quickly become numb to the idea of death in their unpredictable environment.

The New Wilderness is Cook's follow-up to Man V. Nature (2014), a critically acclaimed compendium of climate-related short stories that was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.

It is a timely novel given the threat of global warming that the world is facing today, though it is weakened by how the plot seems to meander with little but petty human drama happening for pages on end.

This, however, could be a reflection of what life is like without modern-day comforts.

The novel focuses primarily on the mother-daughter dynamic between Bea and Agnes. Bea joins the experiment in order to save Agnes, a young girl sickened by the pollution of her old world.

Agnes grows up in the course of the novel, turning it into a coming-of-age tale of a teenager rebelling against her mother - a familiar plotline in any genre - as she argues for a more pivotal role in the Community.

Bea is not much more likeable and can come across as opportunistic, although such traits are necessitated when the characters are pushed to the brink in a world where man - even more so than wild animals or the rough elements - is the greatest threat.

The Community lives by the rules spelt out in a Manual enforced by the whims of Rangers, who ironically ride around on large pollutive trucks despite the world they live in.

There are clear alpha leaders within the Community - including a bunch of Newcomers who join the group midway through the novel - and sub-groups form in ways reminiscent of reality series Survivor (2000 to present).

By Diane Cook

Oneworld/Paperback/ 398 pages/$27.82/Available at bit.ly/NewWild_Cook/

Rating 3.5 Stars

Feral survival instincts quickly come to the fore in this dystopian novel of a world where all hope is elusive, a cautionary tale of what might happen if the world is reduced to ruin.

If you like this, read: Parable Of The Sower by Octavia Butler (Headline Publishing, 1993, reissued 2019, $18.95, available at bit.ly/ParaSower_OB), a chillingly prescient novel set in Los Angeles in 2024.

It imagines a world in chaos due to climate change, wealth disparity, police brutality, corporate greed, and a mercurial, protectionist president.

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Anarchy in extreme wilderness

Eight years ago, American author Diane Cook began imagining a swathe of wilderness.

She did not know how or why it would exist, only that it would be wider than any wilderness that exists now and also the last of its kind.

Then she decided she would put some people in it.

This thought experiment coalesced into The New Wilderness, Cook's first novel, set in a dystopian future where urban pollution is so severe that children are dying from it.

A group of people volunteer for an experiment in which they live as nomads in a wilderness zone, surviving sparingly off the land and leaving as little waste as they can.

Cook, 44, has long plumbed the relationship between humans and the natural world in her work - her 2014 short story collection was titled Man V. Nature - but she says she herself is no expert at surviving in the wild.

"I like getting away from the city," she says over Skype from Michigan in the United States, where she is waiting out the pandemic.

"I like being in the woods. But the idea of surviving in the woods is not something I want to do."

Most of her research, she says, came off the Internet.

"A lot of people online trade information on how to survive, whether it's a Native American tribe who are passing down information via the Internet because that's the best way to do it, or extreme survivalist preppers who live in the woods and know how to survive because they have decided there's a coming apocalypse.

"There are a lot of courses that you can take about how to skin an animal and make a hide."

In the novel, the climate crisis has already come and gone and people are resigned to its aftermath.

Cook, who is now working on a screenplay based on the world of her novel, says matter-of-factly that this is part and parcel of inventing a future world.

"I couldn't imagine a different destination. It just seemed like this has to be what's going to happen if we don't change anything."

If her characters display, at times, a degree of callousness that may shock those back in civilisation - when they lose both one of their number and their best knife in an accident, they mourn the knife more - Cook says it is hardly a leap.

"They've survived so long, they've seen so many people die around them that it's become commonplace.

"Honestly, I see it happening now in the pandemic, where we're making exceptions and accepting certain people's fates. I think we think people are expendable but we don't admit it."

At the heart of the novel is the relationship between the narrators, Bea and her young daughter Agnes, who was dying in the city but now thrives in the wilderness.

"I started this book as a daughter," says Cook. Her mother died of cancer in 2008.

"As a writer, I'm always trying to figure out some kind of way to hold on to her."

Halfway through writing the book, she gave birth to her daughter, who is nearly three years old. Her son was born in June this year.

"I have this grief as a daughter, and then I have this other grief as a mother, because I know my daughter will eventually become someone who's unknowable to me, because she's going to become her own person.

"This sense of loss passing from generation to generation was something I drew on."