The Wilderness

1

In amongst a sea of events and names that have been forgotten, there are a number of episodes that float with striking buoyancy to the surface. There is no sensible order to them, nor connection between them. He keeps his eye on the ground below him, strange since once he would have turned his attention to the horizon or the sky above, relishing the sheer size of it all. Now he seeks out miniatures with the hope of finding comfort in them: the buildings three thousand feet below, the moors so black and flat that they defy perspective, the prison and grounds, men running in ellipses around a track, the stain of suburbia.

The pilot shouts something and points to the right. In the distance a wood is being felled and they can see a tree lean and crash, then another, like matches.

"Surreal from here!" the pilot shouts.

"Yes," he replies. "Quail Woods. Falling."

He leans forward and touches the shoulder of the pilot without knowing what he means by the gesture. A sense of grounding perhaps--he wishes to be back on the ground, and feels nauseous, and a little afraid. In any case the pilot must mistake his hand for a flapping neck scarf or even a bird gone off course, because he doesn't turn.

"My son!" he shouts. "Down there, in the prison!"

The pilot nods and puts his thumb up; maybe he has not understood.

"I built that prison, the new part, back in the sixties," he calls into the wind.

"Yes," the pilot returns. "It's awful, I agree. Blight on the landscape."

He leans as far out as he dare. Can he see his son? Can they see each other? He eyes with dim envy the mechanical, antlike grace of the men running round and round. That one is Henry. No, he is mistaken. That one, perhaps. That one? Impossible to tell, he decides. They are all thin from here, and besides, the wind blurs his vision. The prison is sliding behind them now as the pilot turns east and a limb of shoreline comes into view.

"My son went mad," he shouts to the pilot. He wants

Samantha Harvey was born in England in 1975. She has lived in Ireland, New Zealand and Japan writing, travelling and teaching, and in recent years has co-founded an environmental charity alongside her novel writing. She completed with distinction the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA course in 2005, where she was shortlisted for the PFD prize.

"Closer to Virginia Woolf's meditative novels than anything else I can think of. . . . This is . . . Mrs. Dalloway prose." - Carolyn See, The Washington Post Book World

"[A] brave imagining of [Alzheimer's].... There are moments of clarity; there is the persistence of desire; there are enduring long-term memories that remain after there is no capacity to recall what was for breakfast or if there was breakfast or what the thing called breakfast is." - The New York Times

"Harvey infuses the text with compassion. [ The Wilderness ] conveys the importance of dignity and respect for those we love, no matter what their affliction." - Las Vegas Review-Journal

"A stunning composition of human fragility and intensity." - The Guardian (London)

" The Wilderness is Samantha Harvey's first novel, but it feels like a mature work, as well crafted and as cryptic . . . as an ancient boat found preserved in the peat of the northern-England moors where the book is mostly set." - Bookforum

"A really exciting debut is as rare as it ever was. Samantha Harvey's first novel is an extraordinary dramatization of a mind in the process of disintegration. . . . Brilliant." - The Times (London)

"Very moving. . . . Touches a resounding chord of melancholy. . . . [Harvey] makes you realize that memory can never quite be trusted." - The Scotsman

"A haunting, intelligent novel, crowded with powerful characters, told in a language that is never ordinary, but always clear and elegant." - Tessa Hadley, author of The Master Bedroom and Sunstroke and Other Stories

"Raises intriguing queries about the nature of memory - why we remember what we do, and why we forget." - Ottawa Citizen

"A brave and intelligent crafting of narrative . . . . A mesmerizing work of patient compassion, bearing Jake deep into the vortex." - The Independent (London)