By Diane Cook
Mother and daughter survive the last wilderness
Subject
Themes
In a future where every patch of land has been consumed by the City or surrendered to industry and waste, the last surviving wilderness has been designated the Wilderness State. A group of twenty volunteers enters it as part of a scientific study, most of them fleeing a world they can no longer survive in rather than seeking adventure or knowledge. Among them is Bea, an interior decorator from the City, her academic husband Glen, and their daughter Agnes, who was dying from the City's poisoned air. The Wilderness is Agnes's cure. It becomes her home.
In a future where every patch of land has been consumed by the City or surrendered to industry and waste, the last surviving wilderness has been designated the Wilderness State. A group of twenty volunteers enters it as part of a scientific study, most of them fleeing a world they can no longer…
Diane Cook's debut novel was published in August 2020, at a moment when conversations about climate collapse, land access, and the costs of civilisation had become urgent in new ways. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020 and widely reviewed as one of the most significant literary debuts…
Motherhood in this story is not a state of grace. It is a weight, a contradiction, something that sits differently on each woman who carries it. Bea loves Agnes with a fierceness she cannot always express, and she also resents the coat that motherhood compels her to put on every day regardless of…
Nature in this story is not a backdrop or a metaphor. It is the primary condition of life. The Wilderness State is described with painstaking sensory precision: the nutmeg smell of wet grassland after rain, the sticky sweetness of red-tipped autumn grasses, the particular silence of a landscape so…
One of the ideas the story returns to most insistently is this: proximity to nature does not make people better in any moral sense. It makes them better at surviving. The distinction matters. The Community arrived in the Wilderness with a vague hope, shared by many of them, that living close to the…
The Wilderness State is governed by a Manual. The Manual has rules about how long you can stay in one place, how deep to dig your pit toilets, how to sweep for micro-trash when you leave. The Community follows these rules at first, scrupulously, because they fear being sent home. Over time, the…
Agnes arrives in the Wilderness at five years old, more dead than alive, carried in and then set down. By the time she leaves, she is one of the most capable people anyone in that landscape has ever encountered. Ranger Bob, who has spent his career in the Wilderness State, tells her as much: without…
Bea enters the Wilderness State as a woman who has already made a difficult calculation. Her daughter Agnes was dying in the City, her lungs destroyed by the poisoned air, and Bea agreed to Glen's plan because she could see no other way to save her. She is not a romantic about nature or a true…
Bea enters the Wilderness State as a woman who has already made a difficult calculation. Her daughter Agnes was dying in the City, her lungs destroyed by the poisoned air, and Bea agreed to Glen's plan because she could see no other way to save her. She is not a romantic about nature or a true…
Glen is a professor of prehistoric human development, an expert in how people evolved from their first upright steps through to the invention of civilisation. He is the one who knows about the Wilderness State study and who leverages his academic connections to secure places for himself, Bea, and…
Ranger Bob is the keeper of Middle Post, the checkpoint the Community visits most often and most willingly. He is older than the other Rangers, grey already filling his temples and his thick moustache, and he deals with the Community with a patience and a wry warmth that sets him apart from younger…
Carl is the Community's most formidable hunter and its most volatile personality. He can start a fire faster than anyone, read animal tracks like text, and fletch arrows with a precision that puts Glen's efforts to shame. In practical survival terms, he is indispensable. He provides most of the…
Jake arrives with the Newcomers, the group of City refugees who find the Community partway through a long march into unfamiliar mountains. He is young, poorly equipped like all the Newcomers, wearing the wrong kind of clothes for the terrain. He does not announce himself. He does not demand…
Bea kneels alone in the desert dust, burying a baby she had wanted to name Madeline. The girl emerged already dead, too early, and Bea hollowed a shallow grave with a stick, then a stone, then her bare hands, and laid the small body in it beneath sage branches and wilted leaves. Buzzards spiral…
Twenty people walked into the Wilderness State. That was how it started. The land had been set aside as the last remaining wilderness on earth because every other piece of ground had been swallowed by the City, converted to resource extraction, or given over to waste storage. A group of volunteers…
The Community sets out across terrain none of them has ever seen. They call it the Big Walk, though that name will become a running count over the years; this is the first. They walk for more than a season through grasslands that smell of nutmeg after rain, through vast alkali flats where their…
Agnes does not believe her mother is gone at first. She watches the truck roll away and waits for it to stop and turn around, for the door to fling open, for Bea to come running back on all fours in her frenzy to return. The dust takes a very long time to settle. When it does, the road is…
Bea's return does not soften anything. She walks into camp like a dangerous stranger, gruff and alert, her back rigid, her breath misting in the cold air as though she is something furious and wintered. Carl greets her with his arms out, holding her longer than necessary, whispering in her ear.…
Under Bea and Carl's quiet co-leadership, the Community has stopped wandering. They have spent several winters circling a single Basin, setting up a smokehouse, learning to stay. The Rangers have been absent so long that the group barely remembers how to behave when one finally appears, alone on…
Agnes spends the night after the argument in a tree, watching her mother limp downhill toward Ranger Bob and disappear into the forest below. A helicopter sweeps its light across the Caldera slopes. She does not sleep. In the morning she climbs down and begins reassembling what is left of the…
Bea enters the Wilderness State as a woman who has already made a difficult calculation. Her daughter Agnes was dying in the City, her lungs destroyed by the poisoned air, and Bea agreed to Glen's plan because she could see no other way to save her. She is not a romantic about nature or a true…
Bea enters the Wilderness State as a woman who has already made a difficult calculation. Her daughter Agnes was dying in the City, her lungs destroyed by the poisoned air, and Bea agreed to Glen's plan because she could see no other way to save her. She is not a romantic about nature or a true…
Glen is a professor of prehistoric human development, an expert in how people evolved from their first upright steps through to the invention of civilisation. He is the one who knows about the Wilderness State study and who leverages his academic connections to secure places for himself, Bea, and…
Ranger Bob is the keeper of Middle Post, the checkpoint the Community visits most often and most willingly. He is older than the other Rangers, grey already filling his temples and his thick moustache, and he deals with the Community with a patience and a wry warmth that sets him apart from younger…
Carl is the Community's most formidable hunter and its most volatile personality. He can start a fire faster than anyone, read animal tracks like text, and fletch arrows with a precision that puts Glen's efforts to shame. In practical survival terms, he is indispensable. He provides most of the…
Jake arrives with the Newcomers, the group of City refugees who find the Community partway through a long march into unfamiliar mountains. He is young, poorly equipped like all the Newcomers, wearing the wrong kind of clothes for the terrain. He does not announce himself. He does not demand…
By Diane Cook
Subject
Themes
In a future where every patch of land has been consumed by the City or surrendered to industry and waste, the last surviving wilderness has been designated the Wilderness State. A group of twenty volunteers enters it as part of a scientific study, most of them fleeing a world they can no longer survive in rather than seeking adventure or knowledge. Among them is Bea, an interior decorator from the City, her academic husband Glen, and their daughter Agnes, who was dying from the City's poisoned air. The Wilderness is Agnes's cure. It becomes her home.