The Wilderness
Samantha Harvey

Reviewed by Little Boots

Through our lifetimes, every cell of every part of our bodies is eventually replaced or renewed, meaning by the time we die we are physically an entirely different person from when we were born. If this is true surely the only thing that remains consistent, the only thing that really makes us 'us' is our memories. Perhaps this is why the disease that threatens the loss of them invokes more fear and anxiety than any other disease. I am, of course, talking about the degenerative and incurable disease known as Alzheimer’s.

So it is a brave move by Samantha Harvey to tackle such a difficult, dreaded and not particularly uplifting topic in her first novel. Sticking closely with the first hand narrative of protagonist Jake, the opening chapter places the reader alongside him in a plane, during a flight that is a gift for his 60th birthday, although one he does not seem particularly keen to take. Soaring above the landscape of Jake's life we spot various landmarks; the peat moors that served as the backdrop to his childhood, a son of an Austrian Jew, and later his marriage to a now deceased devout Christian; a stark, modernist prison the former architect designed where is son is ironically serving sentence; and Quail Woods, a recurring landscape which is gradually being hacked down and cleared away, much like the branches of Jake's memory.

Giving the premise of the book I never quite trusted Jake's narrative from the offset, instead enjoying the feeling of shakiness in the skipping chapters and floating narratives, which abide by no rules but occur seemingly randomly, in ever changing length and detail provoked any manner of things, much like memory itself. Instead I found myself relishing in the often complicated but never overly difficult language of Harvey, which feels lyrical and genuinely moving, perfectly accentuating the story without detracting from the believability of Jake. As the story progresses facts become less and less concrete – how did Jake's wife die? Did he have an affair? Did she? Did Jake ever build his dream house in the moor? Did his daughter Alice die young, or did she even exist in the first place?

Like our memories, the narrative is ever changing, from precise, detailed accounts to contradictions, confused voices, newspaper headlines, letters... never quite making sense of the leitmotifs as they appear and reappear in ever changing contexts; a flash of a yellow dress, a wet leaf stuck onto someone's skin... no events are ever clear and chronology becomes increasingly difficult in the incessant chase of an elusive truth which you are never finally rewarded with. Instead, like Jake, confusion rules as things become less and less clear and Jake's narratives more contradictory and unreliable, emphasising his struggle with the past and confusion in the present. Women in his life surface in brief flashes of brilliance – the saintly Helen, his wife who dies from falling from a cherry tree... or is it a stroke?

Joy, the young daughter of his mother's (possible) lover, who Jake enjoys a (possible) sexual encounter with before she flees to America, and remains a lifelong secret correspondent. And 'Poor Eleanor', who has worshipped Jake since they were children and with whom he now finds himself sharing a bed and life, in an awkward but, somehow, touching final relationship. Yet Jake seems to look back on all these encounters as failures, the women he loves permanently escaping him, the only person he manages to trap is his own son, ironically an inmate in the prison he designed, a much less glamorous version of the glass aviary at London Zoo Jake so admired and wanted to base his dream house on.

At the end of the novel Jake returns to the aviary but has no recollection of it, or the people he is with, or the photograph album they hold: the only place the now completely unfamiliar memories can be trapped.

The story is deeply touching, beautifully written with extremely believable characters, in fact as we journey over the peaks and pitfalls of Jake's not particularly impressive life, the sheer ordinariness of it makes it feel that much closer to home, and buries us in the threat that this is a real possibility, showing how close we are all to treading the edge of The Wilderness.