As climate change wreaks havoc on our precious Earth, many writers have chosen to contemplate the end of days by imagining dystopian universes inhabited by sole survivors of the planet’s destruction. These futuristic quests are survivalist in nature, their heroes no longer battling for domination over nature but for humanity’s existence.
Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds imagines a survivalism of the past. Set in 1609 in Jamestown, one of the first British settlements in North America, during the Starving Time when “food shortages, fractured leadership and a siege by Powhatan Indian warriors killed two of every three colonists at James Fort”, it envisions the escape of a young servant girl who has fled indescribable horrors of the dying colony. In the words of one of the few surviving colonists, George Percy, “[N]othing was spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things w[hi]ch seame incredible …” She navigates the vast wilderness with only the tools she has stolen from her domicile and her sheer ingenuity.
The narrative oscillates between the girl’s adrenalin-fuelled flight; her recollections of the tempest-tossed sea journey across the Atlantic Ocean, where her ship-time lover, a Dutch glassblower, is thrown overboard; and her memories of the England she left behind when her mistress chose to follow her second husband, a charismatic, narcissistic minister, to create a congregation of adherents in the New World. Adopted from the poorhouse as a four-year-old abandoned by her mother, “the girl had been given the name Lamentations to remember the stain upon her. Once in the home of her mistress and her first husband, the goldsmith, she began to be called many things – ‘girl’ and ‘wench’ and ‘fool’ and ‘child’ and ‘Zed’ – for she was always the least and the littlest and the last to be counted.”
In Groff’s own words, The Vaster Wilds “is in conversation with early American captivity narratives and Robinson Crusoe … it’s a sly response to the overtly polemical urgencies of those texts … where individual faith wrestles with the Biblical prescription for Man to achieve dominion over nature …” The Vaster Wilds grapples with other themes familiar in Groff’s earlier works: what it means to be a woman in the world fighting for independence, the need for community, as well as “raw, naked, human ingenuity in survival”.
Groff’s bestselling debut novel, 2008′s The Monsters of Templeton, was set in her childhood “picture-perfect” community of Cooperstown, New York. Since then, her novelistic career has dramatically risen to popular success and peer acclaim. Her second, Arcadia, explored the failure of 1960s and 70s utopian communities before flashing forward to 2018, imagining a new virus that first appears in Indonesia then shuts down the planet, killing close to a million people. Her visions have been eerily prophetic, imagining devastating pandemics and authoritarian patriarchies that oppress women. These preoccupations fuelled Fates and Furies from 2015, a much-heralded book about an unconventional marriage.
After her first short story collection, Florida, she published Matrix, an extraordinarily inventive tale of a 12th-century nunnery focusing on Marie de France, considered the first woman to write poetry (known as “lais”) in French. Like Vaster Wilds, Matrix creates a universe not simply through lavish descriptions, lush emotions and dedicated action, but by musical cadence limited to the language of its time. Groff has said that in The Vaster Wilds she experienced much pleasure in playing with Elizabethan language and rhythms.
Ultimately, the new novel is a meditation on solitude as the servant girl flees the colony’s horrifying treacheries to the unknown challenges ahead. “Into the night, the girl ran and ran, and the cold and the dark and the wilderness and her fear and the depth of her losses, all things together, dwindled the self she had once known down to nothing.”
In essence, what is human in her becomes animal. “She was running on little more than the air in her lungs and the forward thrust of her terror … run[ning] towards living … away from a wretched death.”
What keeps us breathless is following her as she discovers new and creative ways to battle for survival as we wonder what exactly she is running from. The book’s conclusion provides the shocking answer.
