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.
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.
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.
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.
RSS Feed
