The Wilderness, by 2024 Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey, has been lurking unread on my bookshelves for many years. I purchased it after discovering the author lives fairly locally, although I have never to my knowledge met her. My husband brought her to my attention as a colleague of his talked of her as a friend when he became aware I reviewed books. He was interested in my opinion of her writing.
Although her most recent and big prize winning novel, Orbital, made it onto my list of recommended reads for last year, I may yet have left this, her debut, to continue to gather dust had it not been rated highly by a more curious reader friend who delved into Harvey’s back catalogue following her Booker success. I am now glad to have finally read it.
“It is not about forgetting, it is about losing and never getting back”
Set mostly in the remote moorland of Lincolnshire during the mid twentieth century, the protagonist, Jake, is a retired architect gradually sinking into the fog that is Alzheimer’s. It opens on his birthday when he is flying above his homeland, including the prison he was involved in building and in which his son resides. The timeline follows Jake’s decline but with flashbacks to the memories triggered, that may or may not be what happened. The tale being told is about memory, its fallibility, the life stories we conjure and how they change as events recede into the past.
Jake was married to Helen and they had two children, Henry and Alice. They met and married in a London still recovering from the effects of war damage. Helen was happy here but agreed to move their family north, close to Jake’s widowed mother, Sara. Other key characters are Rook, Sara’s partner, and Eleanor, who runs the local pub. Jake has known these people since childhood, a time of poverty and acrimony but also good times. A more shadowed figure is Joy. She lives in America and has corresponded with Jake for many years.
Jake is aware his memories are becoming ever more unreliable, a confusion of dreams and reality. He struggles to pull together what actually happened and when – was it yesterday, five years ago, or more? He knows he was unfaithful to his wife, in thought and deed, and without guilt.
“it may seem selfish from an outside perspective but it was not wrong for him to strike out for something he wanted where it caused no harm, where it could come to nothing.”
At some point Jake becomes aware that harm was caused but his mind is beyond filtering consequences with any coherence. There are gaps that the reader may fill. While engendering sympathy it is clear Jake was always a selfish man, particularly in what he expected from Helen. His desire to build a house of concrete and glass, to gain something for himself, blinded him to what he already had.
Helen was a deeply religious woman, something Jake knew when he married her but then became irritated by. She comes across as saintly in her passive acceptance of his criticisms and demands, although brief flashpoints occur when Alice is born and he so obviously favours her above Henry. There are metaphors within the story – a grim bible and a pile of money – that may be taken at face value or for what they represent of Jake’s muddied history.
Jake’s relationship with Sara is also a feature of his character. He believes she repressed aspects of herself, particularly her Jewish beliefs, and blames his father rather than the war and her choices. Now he feels jealousy towards Rook yet struggles to treat Sara with kindness or respect when they are together.
“If he is not hers, he is not a child and does not even exist. He doesn’t want to simply hear the stories she tells, he wants to live in them, so that he might have been there from the beginning, from her birth, so that he is not left out.”
The story of Jake’s life is presented in flashbacks triggered by his current situation as his brain function deteriorates. It is a moving depiction of the damage wrought by dementia. He is offered support from both professionals and personal contacts but more and more cannot ground himself in his present reality, lashing out at those who are becoming strangers to him and whose demands he resents even as they try to save him from himself.
“He doesn’t know if he remembers of not; he doesn’t know the difference between what you remember and what you think you remember, or worse still, what others remember for you.”
Interestingly, some of the seeds of the story that will become Orbital are sown within these pages. They are within minor observations, building Helen’s character.
The women come across as stronger although not in any way that helps them reach their potential. Eleanor in particular has allowed herself to wallow in a desire that will eventually bind her into a life nobody could wish for.
A brilliantly rendered depiction of a man’s descent into the ravages of Alzheimer’s. However critical the reader may be of Jake’s choices throughout his marriage, those who know loved ones suffering from this terrible disease may now look at their frustrations and behaviours with a little more understanding. A recommended read for all.
“For the finest shard of time he believes that he has had his life and that it is over, and a panic grips him because he cannot remember it, not a thing, he has had it and lost it”
The Wilderness is published by Vintage Books.
