From the inside cover of The Wilderness:

It’s Jake’s birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life – his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn’t quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer’s.

This unusual novel, narrated by a man who is steadily losing his grip on reality, is a remarkable journey through the human mind and memory. I’ve never known anyone with Alzheimer’s, as it thankfully doesn’t run in my family (or they die too young), but if I had to guess what it would be like, this novel is it. Jake’s reality comes and goes; he finds his mind a total blank at times but usually he is just confused. He can’t remember if his daughter is alive or dead, why he is visiting this man in jail (his son), or who the woman sleeping next to him is, except in brief moments of clarity. He remembers his younger life the best and often has flashbacks to himself as a newlywed, in love with his wife, a successful architect, a new father. He can’t decide what is real and what he has imagined, or why some memories have significance and others don’t. In short, he is confused.

I’m not sure how I feel about this book. I wanted to love it more than I did, but I think it was too scary for me. I felt sorry for Jake and I just felt that the inevitability of his fate outweighed the beauty of the life that he had lived. It is powerful and it is moving and I suspect it has changed the way I will think about elderly people forever, but it’s also scary and depressing. This is the undeniable truth about what will happen to many of us if we live to be Jake’s age. He has lived a successful, mostly happy life, which he can piece together and remember gladly, but now he is losing that ability before he has even died. He boils the coffeepot dry, he can’t remember if he is supposed to eat eggshells, he forgets that he’s completed some part of therapy five minutes after it’s happened, and he doesn’t even know if his daughter is alive because he’s just remembered her older, and laughing, but at the same time he remembers her dead.

I do think that this is one of those important books that can open our minds to the suffering of others, one of those books that we should all read and think about. It reveals the wilderness that our brains can become as they lose so much in old age. I’m not going to lie though because it is heartbreaking and it is tough to read. It’s a worthy, worthy book, but it will make you cry. ( )

This story is about Jake who is steadily deteriorating from Alzheimers. Rather like a puzzle, we weave in and out of Jake's thoughts, dreams and daydreams as he tries to determine real memory from mis-remembering. Strong female characters feature in this story - from his mother Sara, to his wife Helen, his lover Joy and the woman who cares for him in his illness, a friend from childhood, Eleanor. I have not yet been acquainted with Alzheimers personally thought I have picked up fragments here and there from the press and also through personal accounts from friends who are caring for afflicted relatives. And it is a real affliction - a torment I believe - which is why the book is so very difficult to read!! The author has captured the torment beautifully...as a reader we struggle to know what is "real" and what is "fiction" - a clever conceit if you will. So whilst not my preferred choice for the Booker, I can admire the writing, the characterisiation and the concept. For a first novel I think this is a triumph and such a shame that it wasn't shortlisted. ( )

Jake, the main character in The Wilderness, is an architect getting ready to retire. His family members have died or are otherwise distant from him, and he has Alzheimer’s. As the book begins, his memories are already starting to melt together, and as the book goes on, his understanding of both the present and the past continues to fade.

By adhering closely to Jake’s own perspective, Harvey avoids the maudlin and keeps the reader slightly off-kilter. The focus is not on the tragedy of memory loss and the havoc it wreaks, but on the actual experience, which, from the inside, doesn’t always look so bad.

I’m fascinated by the workings of the human memory and how easy it is for us to manufacture memories of things that never happened. As an architect, Jake is accustomed to creating a physical world; now he can create a new world in his own mind. It’s only when friends and family members speak up that Jake—or the reader—is forced to look the truth in the face. And these looks are never entirely illuminating.

I can’t speak with any knowledge of what Alzheimer’s itself is like and whether Harvey accurately depicts the experience, but as a meditation on the malleability of our personal histories, The Wilderness is a great success.

See my complete review at my blog. ( )

There is a scene early in this novel in which a man's mother gives him an old Bible as a gift.

"'It belonged to my parents,' she said. 'Why don't you have it now, now that you're married to a religious woman?'" the mother asks. "'It's my gift to you both, maybe a wedding gift since you just ran away and married in secret.'"

This is a typically bald moment. Big things come spurting out here without any warning.

"He nodded, a little underwhelmed by the gift..."
"'Helen will like it,' he said eventually, deciding to find in his mother's gesture some attempt ar friendship with his wife.'
"'I doubt it, the cover is human skin,' she said."

Here are two questions Samantha Topol might ask herself. First, would Ian McEwan, for example, write this kind of scene? If she thinks the answer is Yes, or Possibly, or Why not?, then I suggest she might consider she doesn't have much feeling for novel writing. If the answer is No, then she might ask herself, Why not? The answer there might lead into all kinds of questions about how events are staged and framed in novels, how novelists lead into difficult subjects, how they let events resonate before and after they occur, how they let their characters ruminate and mull and ponder, and not just lurch from one revelation to the next.

Some people really do experience life this way, and I feel Topol is one. That's a question of character, not writing. But this is a novel, and these moments are too naked, too coarse, too unmodulated, too full of clichés and unreflective stereotypes. At the moment I am reading Vila-Matas. He is far from a perfect novelist!--but he would never write scenes like the ones in this book. ( )

The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (Book Review)
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey is now in paperback by Jonathan Cape. It has been short listed for the Orange Prize. It is the author’s debut novel. She has a masters degree in philosphy and has taught English, so I am now suprised it is literary and truthfull. It has been brillantly researched. This is a psychological fiction novel about Jake a 60 year old architect who has short term memory loss but his long term memory is ok. The story is his reconciltion of life as he remembers it as he sits on a plane overlooking his country. It is written in a compassionate and literary style. Nothing is as it seems. The disease highlights loss and confusion in life.

“In amongst a sea of events and names that have been forgotten, they are a number of episodes that float with striking buoyancy to the surface”.

As his Alzheimers progresses his memory and his identity goes. It is narrated in the third person and its prose is lyrical. This book is the wilderness of a confused mind attacked by Alzheimers Disease. The story moves back and forth as Jake goes through memories. Fact and fiction and past and present blur in his stories.

” I feel like all my wires are been unplugged one by one. Not even in order just one by one.”

This is heartwrenching and a thought provoking read. It reads like a family drama and we slowly gather the jigsaw pieces together to discover the true story. This book conveys the signifance of our memory and the cruelty of old age. We can outlive our bodies and minds. Anything is plausible and nothing is certain. The themes that run through the novel are: loss, conflict, marriage, love and religion. ( )