Cover: Holly Ovenden
‘The American tribes believe that the wolf can move between this world and the spirit world. That the Milky Way is the Wolf Road down which the first wolf travelled, and that when human beings killed the first wolf that was when death entered the world.’ (p 276)
There are many strong examples of the psychological thriller amongst contemporary adult literature. However, it is less common for a writer to bring this particular genre successfully to a YA audience. However, Richard Lambert does so here with the same powerfully gripping compulsion and moving engagement as the very best of them.
Wolf death
As the genre demands, this is an intense book. It is often a harrowing one, too. Its language is taut and powerful with fractured sentences and repeated fragments often used to particularly striking effect. Its protagonist, Lucas, is hurtled (literally) into horrific tragedy within sentences of the opening, witnessing the gruesome death of both of his parents in a car crash. His trauma is profound and its effects protracted, worked out in difficult relationships with a handful of other people, none of whom are themselves spared life’s pains, the best brittle and distant, the worst violently hostile. All of this is played out against a winter landscape portraying the Lake District, where Lucas has to live with his taciturn grandmother, at its most bleak and isolated. Then behind and through the whole narrative runs the wolf, both creature and metaphor, death and life, hunter and hunted. Above all the wolf is wilderness, glorious and cruel, vicious and gentle. It brought death to Lucas’s parents, can it bring life to their son? This narrative grips like a hand around the throat. It is one of those books that many will devour (and be devoured by) in a single sitting; if only because of a desperate need to breathe again. Not for the young, or indeed for the faint-hearted, it illuminates humanity by focusing on its contorted shadow. It is a masterclass in both writing and storytelling, and those who can live with it may never again live without it.
Richard Lambert’s is an unsentimental book, but not a cynical one. Although it is intensely bleak and troubling, it does, in the end, offer consolation and hope; close connections forged between individuals that may not be ideal, but are at least real.
‘Love - that difficult country, always at your back.’ (p 344)
Whilst not a tyger, this wolf burns bright in the fells of the night, and has a truly fearful symmetry.
Kindred beast
There were several times when The Wolf Road reminded me of Janni Howker’s The Nature of the Beast from the 1980s. The two books share the haunting presence of a speculative wild beast, although in the case of the earlier title it is a big cat on the moors rather than a wolf on the fells.
Both are outstanding titles, and, in mentioning this parallel, I do not mean any diminution of the originality of either novel. Merely that those who, like me, enjoy comparing and contrasting books that share common themes, may be interested to seek out this earlier title too.
Knowable by its cover
The jacket of The Wolf Road, illustrated and designed by Holly Ovenden, is very striking and wonderfully apt; it is a pity that she is not given rather more acknowledgement that the minuscule credit on the back.