As one might expect of ordinary souls thrown into extraordinary strife, the Community’s politicking grows ever more self-serving and craven, and – as their existence is challenged by Newcomers and the unravelling of the structures they were told to believe in – their respective motivations veer further and further from a shared objective.Ĭook remains as dubious of our species’ trajectory as she was in her rich and original short story collection, Man V.
#Into the wilderness book manual
The Community, of which she is a reluctant and pragmatically sceptical member, is tethered to meaning by a set of precious implements – the Cast Iron, the Book Bag, and most importantly the Manual that spells out the rules of their existence, over which the Rangers, to whose whims the experiment and its participants are subject, hold sway.īea’s fellow Community members are not the scientists and experts her well-meaning partner Glen envisioned volunteering for the experiment when he first founded it they come, instead, from walks of life incompatible with survival in the Wilderness State, and their missteps are often costly and harrowing. One of 20 initial volunteers, Bea is part of an experiment allegedly intended to determine whether humans can exist in nature without destroying it. We venture into this inhospitable world in the varyingly close and distant third-person company of Bea, a young mother who has made the impossible and inadvisable decision to join an experiment in the Wilderness State in order to save her little daughter, Agnes, from the wasted City, whose poisoned air has been killing her since the day she was born.
The cataclysm of civilisation has overwhelmed all but a single natural preserve called the Wilderness State, home to the last remnants of North American wildlife, and a small band of nomads called the Community. I n The New Wilderness, Diane Cook’s Booker prize-longlisted debut novel, the end isn’t so much “nigh” as “come and gone”.
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