THE VASTER WILDS IS WILD.
Lauren Groff strikes again with a piercing view of hardship and survival.
Note: THE VASTER WILDS will published September 12th. This review is based on and quotes from an advanced readers copy.
The soreness in her body from her six days running was such that she felt infinitely older than her years, a wizened hag, and she knew that, even should she have long months of only rest, there had been things in her body that had been changed forever. She was but sixteen or seventeen or perhaps eighteen years of age, but the wilderness had so moved upon her that she would never be young again.
THE VASTER WILDS is NOT for the faint of heart – it’s brutally descriptive of one girl’s struggle to survive oppression and hardship. An unflinching look being a lowly female in 1609 at the American Jamestown colony and a dark work of literature because of the intensive level of detail. Like road kill, I often had to put the book down before I could return, but the pull of the story is too strong to stay away for long.
Honestly, Groff may be the most extraordinary researcher writing fiction today. No gruesome act or situation is excluded. No disgusting or disturbing human [or animal] behavior is whitewashed. This is not ROBINSON CRUSOE. Not THE ODYSSEY. Even harder than Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD. And no fable, although it often reads like one.
She knelt and built a small fire and took the pewter mug and plucked some pine needles and boiled them directly in the cup until the water was brown and pungent and sharp with pine. The pine tea went down scouring and brightened her very blood; she felt it shining through her. Her shudderings calmed. Her nausea settled. She took the time to boil more and drink it all down again before deciding upon her way forward, for there was still no other way than forward, one step after another toward hope, toward salvation.
What softens the blow is the Elizabethan cadence and vernacular. Beyond Shakespearean. And the remarkable insight into our dependence on nature.
It was also the case that, when the women and the children of the fort disappeared during the long abject famine, the men of the council said angrily that the men of the place had swept through silent and invisible as the wind and had stolen them. But the girl had always wondered if it wasn’t so, if perhaps the cleverest of the women, seeing the danger on both sides and weighing it, had taken up their children and fled out to the life of the others, perhaps even if it meant being used hard as slaves.
THE VASTER WILDS is, at its core, anti-patriarchy and anti-colonialist, delivered in the great fictional tradition of the journey. However, in contrast to the traditional journey story, every word reeks of the fear of male domination, and subjugation, and the grave, violent, self-serving and destructive decisions made by men of those times, and, too often, still.
Then again, she had lived among the men of the fort long enough to understand that even among her own, too, there were bad men, for there had been gentlemen the girls all whispered to stay away from and soldiers with a red gleam of the devil to them and mercenaries who killed as easy as sleeping, and it would be one of these who would be sent after her, for she knew that at least one bad man would be sent after her, for what she had done could not be permitted to stand.
THE VASTER WILDS is, at heart, a study of faith, in the supernatural as well as in ourselves. The profound essential human connection, and our symbiosis with the natural world. No survivalist has ever been as challenged as “the girl’ on the run. No biblical tale has ever questioned the human condition as profoundly as this. It’s a remarkable achievement, from a writer who from the first has challenged herself, and the reader, to see what needs to be seen. Nevertheless, consider yourself warned: it’s a hard read.
But the fabric of the cloud was being pulled open by the speed of its movement, and now great holes were opening up in it. Through the holes, the dazzling bright sun poked its long pale fingers and touched the ground, and the trees that the light suddenly singled out from the rest appeared so perfect, such pristine exemplars of their species, that she did not know how much she did not see each tree’s perfect beauty before this moment.
NOTE: If you’ve been in a coma or living under a rock and thus have yet to read this great, still young writer, you might start at the beginning with THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON, a modern fantasy. You might better appreciate FATES AND FURIES, a philosophical study of marital conflict. If you love short stories, FLORIDA is masterful. If you would like to visit a commune that misses the mark of its utopian ideal, read ARCADIA. And, if you want to get into a medieval mindset, and fully appreciate Groff’s brilliance, read MATRIX. If you read them in order of publication, you will marvel all the more at her range and her evolution as a master of literary fiction.
THE VASTER WILDS publishes September 12th in hardcover and for e-readers, and also on Audible.