Because of overpopulation, emergencies were thought of more or less as fate.” When Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, won’t stop coughing up bloody phlegm, Bea realises that unless she takes drastic action, her “frail, failing little girl” will die.Īlong with a rag-tag group of 18 others – who “believed in some way their lives depended on it” – Bea and Agnes travel to the Wilderness State to become nomadic hunter-gatherers, as part of a controlled experiment, the particulars of which are shrouded in mystery, to see how people interact with nature. The City, with its extreme pollution, is toxic to children, but hardly any doctors “worked on emergencies any more because there were no emergencies any more. In this dystopian version of the United States, the only state that has escaped the utilitarian drive is the Wilderness State, a rewilded refuge for flora and fauna where humans aren’t allowed. Lands outside the City, such as the Manufacturing Zone, the Mines and the Server Farms, have been requisitioned to serve the City’s needs.
Citizens cannot travel outside the City, nor would they want to, and they count themselves lucky if they live near one of 10 gated trees, left over from a time when humanity lived more harmoniously with nature. No one goes outside except to go from one building to another. Everybody is crammed into soaring high-rise blocks in the City. In The New Wilderness, Diane Cook’s unsettling but riveting debut novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, penthouses, lawns and swimming pools don’t exist any more because they take up too much precious space.
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