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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

Where the wild things are: The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall

6/4/2015

12 Comments

 
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When invited to lead a controversial project reintroducing the grey wolf as a natural predator into the English countryside, Rachel Caine initially declines. She is happy keeping her native Cumbria at a distance, happy heading up the team monitoring wolves in the true wilderness of Nez Perce, Idaho. But, when her mother dies and a drunken night with one of her colleagues takes the relationship too far, she decides to accept the Earl of Annerdale’s offer. The new job, while geographically on a smaller scale, heralds new challenges for Rachel as she grapples with the manners and politics of the country set while confronting the memories of a difficult mother-daughter relationship evoked by the landscape that formed her. The Wolf Border explores the territory bounded by country-house fiction, the natural world, capitalist politics and impending motherhood with some of the finest writing on human and elemental wilderness, for example in an Idaho winter (p68):

Banisters of ice form along the stacked roadside timber. The sky is iron-grey and unforgiving. Idaho exists in a delirium of cold, the number of old people dying soars …

Rachel misses the funeral. She does not send a wreath. She does not supply words of remembrance for the service … Would Binny care if she attended? She would not. She tells herself this, pours a drink, opens the cabin window, and leaves it wide until the cold is unbearable.

Rachel is a wonderfully complex character, independent, married to her work. A proper heroine, fully embodied and attuned to the changes both within and outside herself, such as here on her return to Cumbria and discovering she’s pregnant (p85):

Buds and blossom; there’s a sweet, spermy fragrance in the air, a scent both exquisite and intolerable. The last few weeks she’s noticed a strange sensitivity to such things, aversions, smells that are nausea-inducing. For all that the business of pregnancy is interruptive and alarming, she cannot deny it has its interesting frontiers.

The Wolf Border is a gorgeous novel, about sex, class and old-fashioned sexism; the impact of a chaotic childhood (and plaudits to Sarah Hall for taking psychological advice on this); the prospect of Scottish independence; and the harsh realities of land management the townies, with their idealised notions of the countryside, don’t understand. It’s about the compromise between freedom and comfort, the border between civilisation and the wild. While Rachel’s story doesn’t have a great deal of jeopardy until the helicopter-chase finale, I loved it; thank you Faber and Faber for my advance copy.

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On a personal level, I connected with Rachel’s dilemmas about succumbing to convention, as well as the clashing interests pertaining to conservation of which I’m aware from my voluntary work with another national park. I was also constantly on the lookout for landmarks I recognised, even wondering if Annerdale Hall might be based on the same place I’d used for my surprise flash. Stemming from that part of the world myself – in fact, from one of the “aggrieved west coast towns” (p92) getting its first ever name check I’ve come across in fiction – and touching on the area Charli Mills describes so elegantly in her blog, I couldn’t not use this novel as the springboard for her latest challenge to write a 99-word story about the day the earth turned brown:

Her cheeks were a hodgepodge of colour when he left, slamming the door behind him. Mascara washing into blusher, rainbow shadows streaking from around her eyes. It reminded him of mixing paints as a kid: the power to reduce sky and sun to mud.

Now, under heavy clouds, with the snow recently melted, the moors are likewise conquered: grass leached of green, shrubs stripped of leaves, the heart sucked out of the bracken. He leaves the paths to the Sunday walkers with their Gore-Tex smiles and stumps across the peat to lose himself in a muted landscape of brown.

Thanks for reading, and look forward to your feedback.


Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
12 Comments
litlove link
6/4/2015 05:41:15 am

I absolutely loved this too. I'd never read Sarah Hall before, but I certainly would again. Lovely review, Anne.

Reply
Annecdotist
7/4/2015 02:12:35 am

Glad you agree on that. I had read one of her novels, The Carhullan Army, which I thought was okay but not as good as it was made out to be, so didn't come to this with particularly high expectations. Now I want the world to know how great it is!

Reply
Norah Colvin link
6/4/2015 06:18:22 am

Anne, your flash is brilliant. How heartless of him to think of her tortured face as a school days paint palette, the colour of mud. That was a wonderful description in itself. But the sight of him stomping off across the moors now so brown after being hidden by winter snow add so much to the picture. He seems so cold, cold like the landscape. But will the walk in the warming outdoors warm his heart?
I like the way you congratulate the author of this book for seeking psychological advice for writing her story (that doesn't sound right, but I know what you meant!). It sounds like quite a complex plot and probably one worth the read. Thanks for your insights.

Reply
Annecdotist
7/4/2015 02:17:32 am

Thank you, Norah. I think the walk on the moors will get rid of some of his anger, particularly if he spots a grouse or even a mountain hare with its white winter coat on – or am I getting too far ahead of myself?
I was actually a little surprised that she mentioned a psychologist in the acknowledgements – I think good writers often manage these wounded characters rather well without it – I just wish those portraying a psychologist or therapist as main character would take advice, only found one so far that's done so. Or at least admitted doing so.

Reply
Charli Mills
6/4/2015 02:15:38 pm

I find connections to be meaningful -- I can better understand Cumbria, knowing northern Idaho; I can understand conservation through the wolf debate; and somehow I can't help but think there is a kindred writer across the wide sea who walks peat similar to mine. What a find, Anne -- a book with a connection between the two space we each know. Nez Perce is on HWY 95 south of where Elmira Pond is on HWY 95. I think of the cottonwoods, rivers, forests and plateaus of that area that seem so unique, and perhaps it repeats another place far away. Nature and place are powerful constructs in literature and I think I'd find this book a beautiful read, too! I did pre-order the book and look forward to sitting on my own grassy peat to read. Yesterday I luxuriated in sitting on a spread blanket that warmed beneath the sun, my back against the apple tree and the barn cat purring beside me. I read. Today, it snowed! Such is life.

Your flash uses brown to express the tensions between the characters. From her muddied make-up to the brown expanse, he seems overwhelmed and grasping for solid ground. That brown can be both cathartic and oppressive. Well-inspired!

Reply
Annecdotist
7/4/2015 02:25:59 am

Indeed, I was very excited to find these connections, especially when she had to go to Spokane catch a plane. But I imagine the Idaho landscape is on a much larger scale than Cumbria. Also, I don't particularly associate the Lake District with the peat moors with which I'm now more familiar from the Peak District. I think the western side is more slate-based. it's also been a honey pot for tourists since the time of William Wordsworth, so I don't think of it is so terribly wild. However, I have walked the route from Kirby Stephen to the village of Keld (where the character, Rachel, grew up) and it's one of the boggiest places I've been.
Glad you liked the Flash – just noticed that the Rough Writers badge is brown. I know that's leather, but interesting.
And sorry about your snow. We seem to be in for a sunny spell this week. I was reading outside yesterday for the first time this year. It feels almost decadent!

Reply
sarah link
7/4/2015 08:35:56 pm

Wow. Love the flash, Anne. Brilliant. This ---> " the power to reduce sky and sun to mud" Just gorgeous. (Well, it a sad sort of way.)

Fantastic review of an intriguing novel.

Reply
Annecdotist
8/4/2015 03:15:32 am

Thanks for your support, Sarah, always appreciated.

Reply
Lori Schafer link
8/4/2015 12:12:12 pm

Love the flash, Anne! The imagery is fabulous - so evocative - but what hit me hardest was the line "the moors are likewise conquered." Those few words tell the complete story of the relationship between the characters.

Reply
Annecdotist
10/4/2015 02:09:28 am

Thanks, Lori. I think the drive for that control – of nature in all its forms – is ubiquitous but it does great damage when taken to extremes.

Reply
Luccia Gray link
8/4/2015 03:43:49 pm

Great review. Lovely flash. Like the way the tears on her face and the melted snow on the moors are both reveal colours. Water and colour. Nice :)

Reply
Annecdotist
10/4/2015 02:10:30 am

Thank you, Lucy. Appreciate your support.

Reply



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