The New Wilderness

Diane Cook makes her novel debut through The New Wilderness, a novel with ties to mother-daughter relationships and the effects that humans have had on the Earth. Based in the North American wilderness, a group of people (the Community) have been chosen as an experiment to see if humans can still live in the wilderness with little impact. A dystopian novel set in the future, The New Wilderness, follows Bea, a young mother, who chooses to take part in the experiment due to the smog in the City that has been killing her daughter, Agnes, since the day of her birth. A world thrown into its last efforts to survive, The New Wilderness is the last chance humanity has to survive and it seems that still no matter how hard we try that humanity is doomed and set to destroy everything. 

Although this novel in its essence is about the effects of humanity on the Earth and how humans have little time before we reach these types of last ditch chances at survival, it does not come through strongly enough. This novel seemed as though it were to be a warning call as to what humanity may come to if we do not do something about climate change and the destruction of our planet soon. I am one who loves the development of relationships between characters and their environments but I feel like in The New Wilderness that it overshadowed many of the other aspects of the novel that were meant to be the focal point, like the “hear this warning” of the planet. However, I did thoroughly enjoy the relationship between Agnes and Bea, the hardships of being a mother and making the hard choices for your child. 

The shining light of The New Wilderness, is this portrayal of generational motherhood and the disconnect that comes with the evolution of society and humanity. Bea makes the decision to save Agnes’ life but at the cost of losing her as a daughter to the wilderness. Being a parent there are choices that one must make in order to protect or save their child, and sometimes this choice may be unfavorable to the parent, Cook shows the difficulty in making these decisions very well. Bea’s unwillingness to let go of her possessions from the City and then eventually going back to the City, shows how difficult it can be to be a parent in a changing world. Agnes is eventually able to realize the difficult decisions her mother had to make by the end of the novel. However, there are some dark points of the novel that are underdeveloped starting with the background of the situation that the characters are placed into. There are slight implications that the City became almost unlivable due to smog and low air quality, but it is not explored enough for my liking. I would have preferred if Cook had given more information on life in the City and the people that were being affected by the smog, how it got this bad, if anything was being done other than the study and just more into how humanity made it to the last straw. Now it can be argued that the novel was less about the changing environment, climate change and the destruction of the Earth, and that the novel was truly focusing on motherhood in a changing world. I could see this other point of view, but to me the dystopian genre is regularly focused on the doom of humanity, or the survival of humanity and because of this I lean more towards my original thought process of this novel in its essence being a call to action, a warning of what is to come. I would have hoped that The New Wilderness would have done better in this aspect of its story but it truly lacked the motivation of making a change, because of its lack of background into the world it’s set in. 

Another aspect of the book that makes me skeptical and wonder what Diane Cook wanted out of this book, is that The New Wilderness is rumored to have a tv show in production by Warner Brothers. Now this novel, like many other dystopian writings, to me seems like it would be better for television or was written for tv. I doubt that any author has their sights on the screen but I can guarantee if there is an opportunity to do so anyone would take that chance. So it comes to question whether or not that this was written for the screen and also whether the rumors of it becoming a tv show made the judges choose it to make the shortlist. The novel was rumored to be in production on August 6th, 2020 and on September 15th, 2020 the shortlist was announced which included The New Wilderness. It is all just speculation, but the possibility that this could have been a factor is something that should not have made the choice for the novel making the shortlist, but it is something that we will never know. Diane Cook, writes a dystopian novel based on the failures of humanity and our self-destructive tendencies for ourselves, future generations and the environment. The New Wilderness is a novel that I normally would have shied away from, as I am not a fan of dystopian writings, but nevertheless it was a decent read. The novel covers the topics of motherhood in a changing world, and the efforts of humanity to save itself and survive. I don’t think that this novel would be the best in a classroom setting, to me there doesn’t seem to be a lot of teaching moments in the novel and that is not a knock on the book but more so the genre of dystopia. However, I really enjoy the relationship between Bea and Agnes, it is a great depiction of the difficulties of motherhood, but as I stated before it seems to me that this would be better suited for the screen, as are many dystopian novels. For many differing reasons, the lack of background, the means of production, and an overall lack of a call to action, I would rate The New Wilderness at a 6.0/10.