Illustrations: Manuel Šumberac
Synchronicity?
I do not know if I actually go along with Carl Jung’s belief in Synchronicity, but I have somehow always wanted to.
I recently picked up a first edition hardback of Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child from a second hand bookseller. It is a truly great novel, that I had not read for several years. Rereading it now reminded me just how wonderful a writer she was and what a loss to children’s literature her untimely death.
Shortly after, I received a longstanding pre-order of the latest book, The Winderby Puzzle, by one of the USA’s finest children’s authors Lois Lowry, a book also inspired by the discovery of a prehistoric ‘bog body’.
Now I have just finished this new book, Wilder by Penny Chrimes, a story about a strange child emerging from what was, if not quite a bog, then at least a muddy marsh.
It struck me as at least surprising that even though I read a vast, eclectic range of books, I unintentionally ended up reading three together that are so markedly linked. Was it Synchronicity? Perhaps that’s stretching it. But, whatever, it was at least serendipity, because Wilder is an exciting new find; another very fine book to lie on top of this special little pile.
Painting with words
Rewilding is not just a series of actions, it is a state of mind, and Penny Chrimes book not only epitomises this in its story, but embodies it in Rhodd, its strange but endearing protagonist.
Wilder is was of those rare books that I knew I was going to respond to within the first few pages. When this happens it is more often that not the quality of writing that entrances me, and this was certainly the case here.. Early on in this book with a dominant theme of rewilding, Penny Chrimes ties the notion into a physical description of her young protagonist:
‘Rhodd . . . shook her tousled head impatiently, rewilding the sun-bright mane that Ma tried daily to tame into plaits.’ (p 8)
If, like me, this type of clever, writerly conceit makes you tingle with pleasure, then you will love this book. Regardless, there is much else about it to love too.
Penny Chrimes’ use of ravishing language in evocative descriptions, her striking, poignant images and her challengingly powerful vocabulary choices (‘susurration’, ‘skirling’) continue throughout this wondrous piece of writing. At one point she says Cerys, Rhodd’s adoptive mother, ‘grew still. She gathered stillness about her, as if she were weaving a web every bit as fine as the spiders’, yet a thousand times more secret.’ (p 66). Just wonderful.
Rewilding
However, Penny Chrimes also entrances and engrosses us in an involving story.
Seemingly born as a creature of the wild, Rhodd has the amazing ability to communicate with other wild creatures, not in words as such, but through mind pictures. So strong is her identification with them that she can also sometimes ‘borrow’ and actually see through their eyes. Foremost amongst these creatures is a perigrine falcon, who often hovers in the skies above her and with whom Rhodd has a very particular bond.
Emerging fugitive and alone from the marsh and taken in by widowed Cerys, her ability to connect with the wild seems gradually to diminish as she is encouraged to try to fit is with her new surroundings. To the reader Rhodd’s loss of oneness with the creatures of the natural world, and indeed with her own true nature, is felt as almost heartbreaking.
The village in which Rhodd finds herself was once a thriving fishing port, but has now been abandoned by the river which joined it to the sea. Since the river somehow receded, to be replaced by a stagnant and lifeless marsh, its inhabitants have become bitter and resentful. Although Rhodd is welcomed with warmth and care by Cerys herself, she is treated with suspicion, fear and even hatred by the rest of the community. They already have a paranoid dread of the marsh; not only has it destroyed their livelihoods, but taken the lives of some of their children too. Now all their resentment seems to transfer to Rhodd herself.
The situation worsens as deadly sickness seeps from the marsh, not only killing all the wild creatures, but some of the villagers too. Worst of all, Rhodd’s beloved ‘Ma’ succumbs to the illness and seems close to dearth. Further catastrophe is precipitated when landowner, Lord Stanley, arrives to evict all the villagers from their homes at heartlessly short notice. Rhodd becomes convinced that she alone can save what she loves and that she can only do that by rediscovering her own wildness. She feels that she is somehow linked with the disappearance of the river and determines to bring it back.
Once again Rhodd’s hair provides an image of her transformation, her new, wild energy:
Not even the rain could flatten her wild mane. Her bright hair drew the electrical charge to itself like a lightning conductor: it channelled and tamed its force and became a torch that channelled the brilliance of each strike’ (p
Her transformation back into her true self is rivetingly exciting.
She was Peregrine. The face that stared back at her was savage, merciless. She did not know this Rhodd. But she liked it better than the tame, timid Rhodd who had hidden away for so long.’ (p 135)
And suddenly a story of people suffering the consequences of environmental disaster segues into that which had always been hinted at. It plunges into fantasy, into metaphor, into myth. And Rhodd and her story return to what she and it always truly were - something wilder more elemental.
Making myth
The strength of this book is not as an authentic geo-environmental case study, but as an aesthetic, an extended metaphor, an often poetic exploration of the concepts of the the wild, wildness and rewilding. Its characters become something nearer to archetypes.
Nemesis of the wild is landowner and industrialist, Lord Stanley, trying to contain nature, to force it into the service of his own ends, out of greed for both money and power. Then there is Rhodd’s ‘Ma’, the ‘Wise Woman’, the seer, still in touch with nature and the healing property of plants, but always threatened by of accusations of witchcraft. There is the boy Gar, Rhodd’s only human friend from the village, but who turns out to be the abandoned child of Lord Stanley, bloodline of the perpetrator, the inheritor of shame, yet determined to grow-up different, to make amends.There is the ever-faithful dog, Red, distant (thankfully luckier) cousin of Gelhert. There is Hafren, the elemental river, lost, imprisoned but in need of rediscovery and liberation. And over them all is Rhodd, wild-child, falcon, reconnecting with the voices of nature, seeking to reverse the sickness, the emptiness, the death of the land.
‘Rhodd reached her arms to the sky. For anyone watching it would have been impossible to tell whether this scarred and ragged creature was praying or preparing to fly. Perhaps for her they were the same thing.’ (p 206)
Wilder is a myth for our times and, as such, is crafted beautifully, meaningfully, movingly. The climax of its story is cataclysmic, magnificent. It is an exceptional read that children will not only lap up; they will take imprint from its images and messages in a way that may just help to make our world better in the future.
Manuel Šumberac’s wonderful illustrations are a perfect complement to the text and evoke girl, falcon and marsh with a fitting power and potency.