The Vaster Wilds
This devastatingly beautiful meditation on nature, divinity, and survival is the second volume of a planned triptych begun last year with Groff’s award-winning Matrix. Inspired by 17th-century captivity narratives, this novel follows the flight of the serving-girl Lamentation Callet into the wilderness of Virginia. The settlement of Jamestown she leaves behind is wracked by disease and starvation, but it is her own species’ cruelty she escapes, determined to seek refuge in the northern French settlements. The landscape she encounters in 1610 is largely empty of human habitation, except for the Powhatan people, whom she fearfully avoids due to the ugly tales told of them by her own countrymen.
What follows is an astonishing meditation on the thin boundary between the human self and the natural world. Her journey is rendered in step-by-step detail: each remarkable tactic she uses to stay alive, the memories her observations of nature awake in her, and her ecstatic glimpses of a divine force operating in nature, all of which make her question the “civilization” she was raised in.
This is not an easy read: the prose is incantatory, even scriptural, in style, heavy with description and at times excruciating in its focus on Lamentation’s discomfort and terror. The contrast of her comfortable memories of London with the privations of the sea voyage and her odyssey through the wilds creates an intense sense of irony and occasional bleak humor. Groff’s solemn warning comes through clearly: that humans are not in fact divine in nature but actually the adversaries of the natural world, corrupting all they touch in spite of their best intentions. The theme is grim, but the narrative is so gripping and gorgeously written that the reader’s overall experience is transcendent rather than depressing. A must read for anyone who seeks out nature and survival narratives.
