The Wilderness (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

You have to hand it to Samantha Harvey. She's a gutsy writer. Not only is her main character the opposite sex to her and double her age. Her protagonist, Jake, is also suffering from Alzheimer's. Whilst a few celebrated authors have been bold enough to give a character Alzheimer's, no one (that I am aware of) has ever attempted to write a whole novel from the point of view of the sufferer. This is a truly unique novel.

And Samantha Harvey not only pulls this off, but does it with confidence, artistic flair, wit and warmth. It is a sensitive novel told with heart and passion and raises not only questions about what it means to have Alzheimer's but also what it means to be human and alive and loved. As we move through our lives, how we see ourselves and are in turn perceived, is built from our memories. We are the cumulative product, after all, of our own lives, made up from the things we've done, the experiences we've had. Without the memories of this then, what are we? Who are we?

These are just some of the questions tackled in The Wilderness. As Jake slowly succumbs to the disease so his memories fracture, the threads that tie them together - the very web of the novel - becomes tatty, torn and broken. The plot lines that form the novel - the various periods of Jake's life - swill in and around each other. The revisited memories bleed into each other, fact into fiction, fiction into fact, tales within tales, memories within memories...

It is not depressing. This novel is life affirming, filled with characters that, whilst all highly intelligent and philosophically minded, are never annoying. Their quirks, their struggles, their minor triumphs bring them to life. Jake himself is not always appealing as a character but he is devastatingly human. As is the lovable `poor Eleanor,' his son Henry who is in prison, his daughter Alice who existed or maybe didn't, wife Helen, lover Joy. Even the dog, Lucky (if indeed that is her name).

Covering a complex web of inter-related tales and ideas that span as far as the eye can see, the novel is written with pristine care. Every sentence sparkles and zings with its freshness and Harvey's obvious fun with words, whilst the worlds her characters inhabit leaps effortlessly from the page. This is a novel that should be read slowly and savoured, just as our memories should be. The Wilderness is a truly outstanding debut and one of the most thought-provoking novels of the year. Word of mouth will undoubtedly launch this into the best-seller lists. If you don't want to be caught in amongst the crowd, I suggest you read it now!

Your journey in life is very personal to you. In your head you carry around experiences and knowledge that has been built up throughout your lifetime. Alzheimer's disease slowly strangles, tangles and erases your brain processes.

How does that feel? How does that affect you? What is it that makes you you? This is the journey that The Wilderness takes you on.

This should be a dark and depressing subject but Harvey lifts the reader with her poetic and brilliantly crafted prose into a life-affirming crescendo that does not disappoint.

I very much wanted to like this book as I feel Harvey has tackled a very difficult subject - Alzheimer's Disease, and deserves credit for her bravery. Any writer who can extrapolate from the symptoms of this terrifying condition a sense of what it must be like, has gone to the extremes of writing about what she cannot know - all plaudits are, therefore, primed to be deserved. I can think of only one other writer, B S Johnson, who, in his book House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy, attempted to simulate in detail what losing one's memories and one's everyday abilities to function competently must feel like. But B S Johnson's book is a highly expressionistic painting, wild, irreverent and hilariously, blackly funny. It is a triumph, besides which Harvey's book is merely a slog.

The fault, in my opinion, is in giving us too much information. The lives of Jake's mother, his son, his daughter, his wife, his two lovers, a possible lover of his wife's, and a character called Rook, who is one of his lovers' grandfather, all intrude on the story. There is no plot, as such, other than who might be sending letters to his dead wife - and that is never resolved. The book leads us only towards a cluttered impression of Jake's feelings. There is too much irrelevant lost baggage carted along the way. The structure of the book is far too traditional as Harvey struggles to suggest a lost self by giving us details of said lost self. It doesn't, it can't, work.

The pieces which describe Jake's decline, and particularly the details of his relationship with his son, Henry, are poignant, bitter, brilliantly real, glittering moments, but they are too few to carry the heavy freight of all the extraneous characters. Rook, in particular, is a complete failure and reads simply as an intrusion into the potential of the book to carry off its, admittedly difficult, central obligations. In this case less would definitely have been more.