It’s Jake’s birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life – his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his mid-sixties, and he isn’t quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer’s.
As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he’ll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all?
From the first sentence to the last, The Wilderness holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.
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Jake Jameson has trouble finding himself, trouble locating himself in moments and places. The retired architect stutter-steps through his days, not knowing how he got from the top of the stairs to the bottom, or what point he's been arguing so forcefully. But, “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.” These episodes are the stories around which Samantha Harvey's “The Wilderness” is built.
Jake's wilderness comes from his Alzheimer's, and he attempts to tame that wilderness with his life's mythologies, the creation stories of his self. The stories contain his defining moments: the death of his wife, the conception of his daughter, tales told by his mother. Jake considers himself to be “nothing if he has no true stories.” The impossibility of these moments as he remembers them, though, and the incongruities between the tellings, the overlapping details, the blanks, leave Jake with very little of his own. His disease is rearranging his memories, some fading and some cut and pasted like a collage of impressions collapsed from many times into one. “The Wilderness” is quietly devastating. Jake's stories dissolve as the book progresses. His loss erases his losses and his insufficiencies, but it also kills his truths and certainties. He no longer remembers whether or not he likes raspberries, or where his daughter Alice has gone. Even the cause of his loss is taken from him: Jake is befuddled by his visits to the doctor, and forgets that he is prone to forgetting and forgets just how much he has forgotten.
Despite being quite sad, “The Wilderness” is also quite beautiful, at times an impossibly simple portrait of a man stripped of himself, remaking the important bits of his life over and over. Harvey seems to have a profound understanding of his state of mind, and I found myself identifying with Jake's musings in moments both lucid and lost. As an architect, Jake has spent his life attuned to the erosion and destruction of his buildings, and dreamed after a home of glass, built on the moors, in which he planned to live out his life with his wife and children. The home would seem to rise up from the peat, land that tends to eventually pull everything down into its mire, and only be visible by its outlines and the people and conveniences within. The dream home distills Jake's problem into simple terms: what happens when the house empties of people and the peat finally succeeds in reclaiming the structure and returns the land to nature? A man, unknown to himself, succumbs to the wilderness and eventually fades out of existence.
