Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Book review by Peter Lawrence 25th July 2009
Samantha Harvey is a new and young writer. Her debut novel, The Wilderness, deals with the very difficult subject of Alzheimer’s disease, and has been universally well received. It was shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction and, although it didn’t win, we will certainly be taking a lot of notice of this writer in the future.
In a radio interview recently, Samantha Harvey made clear she had no direct personal experience of Alzheimer’s, either as a carer or as a medical expert or in any other way. The no holds barred portrayal of the descent into mental darkness of the main character, a sixty-something architect called Jake, is therefore as amazing as it is unsettling and profoundly sad. An interesting aspect for me, however, was that although the novel is sad - to watch someone’s descent into oblivion cannot be other than sad – it is not depressing. I did have a sense of ‘there but for the grace of god go I’, but I did not feel depressed and hopeless at the prospect. This is, I think, a mark of Samantha Harvey’s skill. She intersperses the narrative of Jake’s current decline with some rich episodes from his past which show that he has lived a broadly enjoyable life, experienced some good things and made some loyal and caring friends along the way.
Harvey scarcely puts a foot wrong in this novel. She remains firmly in control throughout, and makes us see the full horror of Alzheimer’s as exactly that – a horror. To see Jake trying so hard to order his thoughts and memories, so convinced that he has got it right, or trying so hard to remember details that are clearly there for those of us of sound mind since they happened only a page or a paragraph before, is achingly sad. Harvey’s style in portraying the gradual disintegration of Jake’s memory is profoundly unsettling. We start out by relying on Jake’s memories of the past as being fairly accurate, and so we take those episodes of the novel set in Jake’s youth as being true without question. However, as we start to see the disorientation in Jake’s mind we come to realise that none of these memories is reliable. Things may have happened the way they are recorded, or they may not. We don’t know. Jake’s somewhat haphazard recollections undermine them as the very anchors that we all take our memories to be. With this disease nothing holds stable.
One of the saddest aspects of the book is unquestionably Jake’s awareness in the early stages of his illness of what he has and what the inevitable outcome will be. There is, it seems, a public denial and a supreme effort to carry on, as might be the case with all of us, but at the same time a private terror as he experiences his grip on reality and his independence loosening.
As we see Jake in his earlier life in scene after scene, we too can get some indication of the confusion he experiences. I found myself forgetting who characters were or which events they were connected to, precisely because the memories are fluid and variable. The confusion that we experience with these episodes is a timely reminder of the Sword of Damocles that hangs over us all as potential sufferers of this condition.
This is certainly neither a comfortable nor an easy book to read. It is, however, a supremely good one. I was gripped from the very beginning and was completely convinced by what feels like a very accurate and sensitive portrayal of this disease and its effects. Whilst you may not enjoy the book you cannot help but be moved by it, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.