Customer Reviews

The Wilderness: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Samantha Harvey does a magnificent job of taking us inside the mind of a man, Jacob, who is slowly losing his touch with reality due to Alzheimer's Disease. The story and the circumstances, are from his point of view, and we come to realize after a while that they are sometimes confused. Things that are seemingly facts don't always match and the reader has to try and sort out the real from the imagined. But in Jacob's mind the events which cover parts of his childhood, his marriage, his children, and one or more possible affairs are all perfectly real for much of the book. Certain thoughts are strong and common throughout the book and others are only touched on and one wonders how they fit in. As the disease progresses, he too becomes more confused, but we are left with only his thoughts, not knowing which are of actual events and which are imagined or tangled with other thoughts and not entirely accurate.

When I first selected this book, I was drawn to the subject matter, a disease that is so hard to understand, but then turned away because I thought it would be depressing. I came back out of curiosity and the thought that this could be a unique story, wondering how the author would handle it. The subject matter is, of course, depressing. But Harvey is a very insightful and talented writer and the end result is a book that is both interesting and somewhat of a mystery at the same time as the reader tries to distinguish facts from increasing confusion in the character's mind. The book that made me empathize with the character as I tried to sort through his memories and come to my own conclusions about what was real and what was not. It's a story that won't leave me for a long time.

But oh no, not an easy read. I'm used to racing through books, but who can race through the tangled wilderness of a deteriorating mind. And who would even want to skim quickly through the rich landscape of imagery created by this most-talented author...

Ms. Harvey deftly flips back and forth through time and memories as Jake's mind and world erodes. If we are lost, consider poor Jake-- or perhaps your mother, or your father-in-law, or your great-aunt Charlotte --as they wander through the tangled wilderness of their failing brains. Per Jake: "Time speeds up, rushing headlong into conclusions, then it stops. There is something teenagery about it. Something uncomfortable and maladroit as if it has not learnt how to pace itself with space."

And what is the nature of memory after all, when, in fact, the act of remembering irretrievably alters the memory. What's real in Jake's meanderings, what's manufactured? And what's with all this wandering around on the moors through blinding snow or fading yellow light to the jarring noise of random gunshots?

With prose worthy of Ian McEwan and the creepy imagery of Tim O'Brien's "In the Lake of the Woods", and finally and most completely, with her own talent and style, Samantha Harvey has created a masterpiece.

This story is, I think, an exploration of the meaning of memory and and self. If memory erodes, self erodes or warps. It is a worthy topic, but I never could quite get into it.

Perhaps it is just too much work for me. Instead of crystalline language and tight architecture, it is as though the elements of book were dropped on the floor, swept back up and packaged so the reader is challenged to put it back together again. To quote the author, "The idea of the eternal story delighted Helen and perturbed him. If a thing went on forever, how could one ever know its centre point, where its weight settled? It seemed to him to not be a story at all...far too resonant of the way he is beginning to think, the motifs that repeat in his mind like subliminal messages..." [p.210] This suggests the author's intent and reader's challenge.

Samantha Harvey wants the reader to feel the disorientation of Alzheimer's. As a reader, I was willing to try and work with the author, giving the story and book time to mature as I read but I lost patience. So many of the sentences are weighted with implied significance that felt as though I needed to remember for later, and then disappeared to be replaced by a new sentence with new significance. Perhaps that is what Alzheimer's is like and Harvey has accomplished something astonishing. At the same time, the characters discuss their their duty to each other: who and how to love, whether the duty of being a Jew is greater than the duty of being a father and husband, of the limits of friendship and responsibility for one's actions. This is a literate, intelligent book with a high minded sense of non-structure that challenges the reader to bring his own order, picking up brief conclusions or assessments then reassessing a few pages later. I am willing to do that work if the language, the word choices, the structure, the atmosphere or the depth of the characters seduce me along the pages--if the craft of the writing is irresistible. I did not find that here, although I am sure that some readers will.

I felt the book was much like modern art: clear talent, tremendous intelligence but intended for an intelligentsia of which I am not a member and whose signposts I do not recognize.

This type of story really isn't my cup of tea, but I have to admit I enjoyed this novel. I probably would have gotten more from the tale if I knew or had known someone in Jake's perdicament. Luckily, I have been fortunate enough to have gone through almost 40 years without having someone I love and care for suffer through Alzheimers. And if Samantha Harvey's portrayal is accurate, I hope I never will.

The one aspect of this novel that may keep it from mainstream attention is the fact that it is written in the first person perspective. This means that all information given to the reader comes from Jake's diseased mind. The reader must try and understand what Jake is remembering correctly, and what is a by-product of his disease. I find it difficult to invest myself emotionally in the novel when the voice of the novel cannot be trusted. Granted, that is the horror of Alzheimers, and that is precisely the point of Harvey's novel, but it still kept me at arms length from fully embracing the story.

Harvey obviously spent quite a bit of time doing her research, and it is hard to believe that this is a debut novel, she seems to have found her stride comfortably with her first novel. I will be interested in seeing how she follows up with her next story.

I couldn't help but compare Samantha Harvey's first novel, The Wilderness, with Lisa Genova's first novel, Still Alice. They are, coincidentally, both about victims of Alzheimer's disease, and both are recent releases, which only adds to the temptation to compare. My having read Genova's book first is perhaps why The Wilderness didn't strike the right chords with me.

While Ms. Harvey's writing is intelligent and informative, throughout the book I wanted her to step away from Jake's perspective and give the reader more places to plant her feet, more ways to separate truth from delusion. She certainly took a chance by writing the novel in the first person, thereby making it impossible to look at Jake's deterioration from any but Jake's point of view, something that was ever changing as his disease progressed.

This tactic worked so well in Nikolay Gogol's Diary of a Madman, where throughout the entire story, short periods of sanity provided a necessary counterpoint to a downward spiraling psychosis, but in The Wilderness, I never could pin down any of Jake's memories that were to be relied upon as building blocks of information. I felt adrift through most of the novel, as much a victim of his disease as was Jake.

I would recommend reading Still Alice before reading The Wilderness, or if you found The Wilderness too thick to penetrate. I will be very interested to see what is Harvey's next book. She is an excellent writer but took a big bite to chew for a first novel.

For a first novel, The Wilderness is a mature piece of work. At first I resisted reading the book, thinking that a novel about Alzheimer's would be too depressing. While there are episodes that certainly are difficult and disturbing, the book is not solely concerned with the devastating consequences of this disease. At its core this is a book filled with finely wrought characters, centered around and seen through the lens of its main character's fragmenting psyche. Although the book focuses on a 'present time' in which Jake is struggling with the more profound effects of Alzheimer's, his life story is told in a series of and non-chronological flashbacks. The interesting wrinkle here is, as the book progresses, the reader becomes progressively aware of the fact that many of the recollections recounted are not factual but instead are seen through the eyes of an unreliable observer. Jake struggles with a nameless guilt, blaming himself for the loss of his wife and his son's poor choices. His guilt has colored his perceptions, producing false memories, that while not entirely factual provide the reader with deep insights as to why he he has come to feel responsible for the loss and pain of those closest to him. Reading between the lines, the truth begins to rear its head, although much remains a mystery even at the turn of the last page. Truth, the author seems to contend, is a chimera and far from simple and objective. Or rather, subjective truth sometimes carries more weight than objective reality.

The prose is generally high quality and while the nature of much of the material is depressing, I did not find this to be a downer of a novel. A man's life is splayed out before us, his folly, his loves, his passions, his successes and his failures. Being an architect, Jake is possessed of a strong drive to build, to create. Yet upon retirement and with the loss of his wife and the onset of the disease, Jake is forced to reflect upon the transience of all things and coming to terms with what is truly important. As many of the buildings he designed are torn down to be replaced, only the prison he created stands as testimony to his life's work. Confused and baffled, he struggles to make sense of the meaning of his life as the very fabric of his personality, i.e. his memory is slowly being dismantled before his eyes.

There are a number of digressions in this book, philosophical discussions about architecture that seems imposed upon the narrative. These discussions seem to break the flow of the novel rather than support its development. It only occurs a few times but each time it had the effect of taking me out of the literary rhythm that had been previously established. These are small criticisms of a significant debut novel that I highly recommend despite its somewhat daunting subject matter.

"The Wilderness" asks this question: what happens to one's conscious being when Alzheimer's disease ravages the mind? In this ambitious and interesting novel, the protagonist, an architect named Jake Jameson, moves through the stages of his inexorably progressing illness. At first his memory is fairly clear, but the details of everyday existence, like remembering to put water in the coffee machine before turning it on, begin to cause him distress. Gradually, as Jake moves in and out of more lucid intervals or becomes lost in memories, we learn quite a bit about his life, but there are mysteries still, some of which are never resolved by the end of the novel because Jake's mind can no longer resolve them for us. In this way, a reader experiences some of the gaps in memory that Jake himself constantly endures. Why IS his son in prison, we wonder, but since Jake is the narrator, he can't tell us. The novel itself moves in a fashion I can only describe as tangled, like the very plaques that are destroying Jake's brain. Here too, Harvey wants us to think just like Jake thinks; sometimes, as you read, you feel as confused and out of focus as Jake himself. Thus, "The Wilderness" can be a frustrating book to read, since it refuses to treat Jake or his dementia as child-like. His thoughts have a complexity and a kind of strange logic that demand respect, even when the "fox-haired woman" (the medical professional who looks after him) treats him with distant clinical indifference and Eleanor, the woman he lives with, reacts with understandable frustration and despair.

In short, "The Wilderness" suggests that Jake's mind, even as he becomes more difficult to understand, is not degraded or juvenile or simple. Because he has lived a complicated life, his diseased mind is a complicated mind, still rich and detailed, just different from what it was once. The book brought to mind another man with a progressively disabling disease: Alfred Lambert, the father with Parkinson's in Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections." "The Wilderness" is not nearly as engaging a novel; it is serious throughout, without a shred of humor. However, you'll feel empathy and, if you know someone with Alzheimer's, you may gain understanding. Who are we, Jake seems to ask, when we make sense to no one, recognize no one---except ourselves?
N.B. This novel is on the 2009 Booker longlist.

Samantha Harvey has written a most powerful book. It's not an easy book as most of this happens, that happens, happy ending fiction is. The Wilderness, the word, encompasses a co-inherence of time, character, place and plot. In the wilderness the facts like smoke shimmer and change shape, focus and fade. The language is full of wonder. You will not read a more stirring book on the wages of Alzheimer's disease- or the meaning of survival.

Samantha Harvey captures the essence of the devastating affect of Alzheimer Disease, on a man's mind, in her debut novel "The Wilderness." The novel is written in the first person. Ms. Harvey paints a word picture of a man who finds himself in a tangled web of uncertainty in a downward spiral of confusion.

This is Jake Jameson's story, a story which gives the reader a look inside his mind. Jake is caught up in a subtle decline of his mental abilities. Although often deep in denial Jake recognizes the progression of entropy that is taking place as his brain erodes leaving him in a state of confusion and uncertainty, with an unexplained heaviness and sense of guilt. As his mind deteriorates he finds himself in midst of a battle mixing reality with imaginary, and an ambiguity of truth and delusion.

In eye opening realism Ms. Harvey adds a unique dimension as she focuses on Jake's mind processes as he deals, with the uncomfortable and difficult issues created by dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Harvey's writing is sensitive and strong. By telling the story from Jake's viewpoint she has created a masterpiece which gives the reader a sense of experiencing that very confusion.

Jakes' story has provided me with insight that will help me empathize with those caught up in the difficulties of the disease, allowing me to offer them understanding and comfort. This is a story that will linger in my mind in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

I struggled for a while with Samantha Harvey's novel `The Wilderness', not because it isn't beautifully written but more because it is painstakingly structured. It's a novel that feels almost too well thought out, to the point where everything becomes rather redundant and unbearably uninteresting. Harvey has a lot of talent, as can be seen in the way she `dresses up' this novel, but when all is said and done it is a novel that can be very difficult to read.

The idea of addressing Alzheimer's from a more mature point of view is one that I am intrigued with, which is why I really wish she had placed a little more effort into making the novel feel as fresh and as inspired as the prose. I normally have no problem with detail, but this was a novel that felt overwrought (this coming from someone who loved Murray Bail's `Eucalyptus'). One other issue I have with the book is the fact that it was told from Jake's point of view and so the novel contains the same inconsistencies that his memory does. This seems like a genius gimmick, but it doesn't work as completely as it should. By taking out chunks of fact and leaving almost everything ambiguous, Harvey leaves us scratching our heads more often then not, which leads us to become uninterested in the novel.

It's hard when you pen something of this nature because reading a novel is far more complicated than watching a film. In fact, I'd be tempted to say that a film adaptation of this novel would probably be fantastic and something I would totally indulge in. The problem with a novel is that, when you leave too many questions unanswered (and not just one big mystery but mystery after mystery after mystery, some of which have the most juvenile of conclusions), you run the very big risk of causing disinterest, the result of a detachment on the part of the reader.

We simply stop caring.

I was about half way through the novel when I contemplated closing it for good (not really half way, I was on like page 107). I didn't, mostly because I wanted to write this review, but I must say that it was hard to finish. In fact, in the time it took me to read this novel I read three other novels while taking breaks from this. The only other time that has happened was when I read `House of Sand and Fog', but the difference was that `House of Sand and Fog' completely redeems itself in the second half of the novel, which I became so engrossed in I finished in like two days. `The Wilderness' never grabs me in that way.

Like I said, I see a lot of promise in Samantha Harvey. She has a knack for descriptive writing that never comes across forced or corny. She understands how to paint an eloquent and impressionable picture; she just needs to work on constructing an equally intriguing story.