The World My Wilderness

I began ‘The World My Wilderness’ feeling rather lukewarm about it, as the opening pages confused me with descriptions of two women without making it clear which was which. Once the plot moved from rural France to London, though, it became very compelling. The setting and themes have a curious similarity to [b:Space Below My Feet|18595791|Space Below My Feet|Gwen Moffat|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398035623s/18595791.jpg|26342413], the memoir of a young woman who deserted from the ATS immediately after WWII to live rough and climb mountains. The main character of ‘The World My Wilderness’ is Barbary, a young woman who lived with her family in occupied France during WWII and struggles to adjust to postwar London. Her show more piratical name is indicative of her nature; helping the marquis fight the Nazis during wartime has traumatised and hardened her. Despite the comfort of living with her father (who divorced her mother and remarried), she camps in ruins and steals whenever possible. I appreciated Macaulay’s depiction of the Second World War’s legacy in England as the absolute opposite of ennobling. Instead, rationing and privation has made everyone dishonest and suspicious, most criminal, and some violent. The book’s main message seems to be that the war smashed the veneer of civilisation, not just in the places most obviously occupied and destroyed, but more fundamentally. The social contract was ripped up and seemingly well brought up young ladies like Barbary got mixed up in sabotage and murder.

Unlike [b:Space Below My Feet|18595791|Space Below My Feet|Gwen Moffat|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398035623s/18595791.jpg|26342413], which is fundamentally an optimistic account of female freedom, ‘The World My Wilderness’ is pessimistic about Barbary’s future. It’s clear to her family that she had some intensely traumatic experiences during the war, which the reader finds out included being raped and tortured. Subsequently running away from her family and shoplifting don’t make her happy, because she cannot escape what she went through. The narrative examines this, and the responses of her family, with considerable subtlety. The characters are all very well observed and their moods and awkwardness entirely convincing. Two other notable features are the treatment of religion and of the built environment. In the former case, I was reminded of [b:Brideshead Revisited|111620|Brideshead Revisited|Evelyn Waugh|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1393880521s/111620.jpg|2952196] as Catholicism is seen as a comforting way to turn against the frightening present and hark back to the golden-hued past. Various characters seem ready to believe in hell but disinterested in other Christian doctrine, including a traumatised priest. The tradition and ritual of religion seem to offer only limited comfort in the wake of world war, yet for some this is better than nothing.

As for the built environment, Macaulay’s most beguiling writing is reserved for the haunted ruins of bombed-out London, where Barbary and her disreputable pals lurk all day. The lyrical, effusive descriptions of an urban fabric being reclaimed by nature bring to mind [b:After London: or, Wild England|2220037|After London or, Wild England|Richard Jefferies|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348221574s/2220037.jpg|905982]. These sequences also reminded me that London was so denuded of people during WWII that it only returned to its pre-war population level about five years ago.

Still the ghosts of the centuries-old merchant cunning crept and murmured among weeds and broken stones, flitted like bats about dust-heaped, gaping rooms. But their companion ghosts, ghosts of ancient probity, honourable and mercantile and proud and tough, that had lived side by side with cunning in the stone ways, and in the great blocks of warehouses and offices and halls, had deserted and fled without trace, leaving their broken dwellings to the creeping jungle and the crafty shades.

I found this novel to be a surprising and thought-provoking reflection on the war’s domestic legacy. Barbary and her family are fascinating characters and it is notable that no soldiers appear, other than a few deserters. The war’s impact on civilians and society is examined in a clever, original way. It is made clear that individuals and society cannot return to their happier pre-war state, although Macaulay does not suggest that recovery is impossible. When the book was first published in 1950, though, it must still have seemed a long way away. show less

What a strange, strange book with a seemingly naïve main character, Barbary Deniston, who after a London upbringing goes with her mother to the South of France in 1939 and spends the next seven years there, learning to speak Midi French and running wild with the young Maquis.
The book starts in 1946 and Barbary returns to a London devastated by the Blitz, still full of the ruins of bombed buildings, which are populated by deserters, on the run from military police.
Macaulay’s descriptions of bomb scarred London seem surreal, more like something out of a J G Ballard novel, although presumably realistic of that post-war period:
The children stood still, gazing down on a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a show more wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, brambles and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs. (page 49)
Summer slipped on; a few blazing days, when London and its deserts burned beneath a golden sun, and the flowering weeds and green bracken hummed with insects, and the deep underground cells were cool like churches, and the long grass wilted, drooped and turned to hay; then a number of cool wet days, when the wilderness was sodden and wet and smelled of decay, and the paths ran like streams, and the ravines were deep in dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Mayan temples, hiding them from prying eyes. (page 74)
It is also a wonderfully literate book, opening and closing with quotes from The Waste Land, and referencing amongst others Shakespeare, Marlowe and Pepys.

For me this book has only a meandering narrative about the uneasy compromises of war, instead seeking to capture the mood of a well-off, but partly Bohemian, English family after World War II, and, most memorably (although there are descriptions of the French Pyrénées and the Scottish Highlands), the ruins of a London peopled by the ghosts of merchants and artisans from centuries past.

Richie at the end of the book looks across the ruins of the City of London in the autumn and quotes:
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones. show less

The World My Wilderness is the story of Barbara Denison (or Barbary), a teenage girl who used to live with her Bohemian mother and French stepfather in France during WWII. All her experience is with the French Resistance, running free to do as she liked. When her stepfather drowns, Barbary is sent back to her father, a distinguished lawyer, and to London, still ruined from the Blitz and very much resembling a ghost town.

On the surface, The World My Wilderness is a coming of age story, set at a time when things had changed drastically. Macaulay uses the theme of wilderness and jungle over and over to illustrate the way that Barbary feels. She’s torn between the two halves of her family, belonging no place and lost. The World My show more Wilderness is one of Rose Macaulay’s most complicated novels, and Barbary is a complicated character because there are two sides to her. She’s frequently described as a small, slight girl, but she’s experienced enough in her life that she seems more mature beyond her years. The feeling of being lost that Barbary has is mirrored in the London landscape, which is why Barbary and her friends are so drawn to the ruins around St. Paul’s. It’s a stunning, well-written novel.

"So men’s will to recovery strove against the drifting wilderness and tame it; but the wilderness might slip from their hands, from their spades and trowels and measuring rods, slip darkly away from them, seeking the primeval chaos and old night which had been before Londinium was, which would be when cities were ghosts haunting the ancestral dreams of memory." show less

Rose Macaulay was a hugely prolific and popular writer – and The World my Wilderness was the novel she published in 1950 following a decade of silence. Of Macaulay, Penelope Fitzgerald in her introduction to my VMC edition, says:
“Rose Macaulay was born in 1881, and died in 1958. As a young woman she went bathing with Rupert Brooke, and she lived long enough to protest, as a well-known author and critic, against the invasion of Korea.”
(Penelope Fitzgerald, 1982)
That was enough to make me want to know Rose Macaulay a lot better. The World my Wilderness was my first ever novel by her – one which at the time apparently surprised her fans, more used to social satires.
The World my Wilderness is a wonderful novel, set in the fragile show more post-war world still reeling from the difficulties and betrayals of the war years, it is a novel which explores beautifully, the damage parents do to their children.
It is 1946 and Barbary Deniston has been living in France with her beautiful, indolent mother Helen throughout the war years. Their home at the Villa Fraises in Collioure, an area occupied by the Germans during the war is a place of relaxed freedom and sunshine. Helen, divorced from Barbary’s father, married a wealthy Frenchman widely seen as a Nazi collaborator.
“Barbary slipped from the room, as quiet as a despondent breath. She and Raoul had acquired movements almost noiseless, the sinking step, the affected, furtive glide, the quick wary glancing right and left, of jungle creatures.”
Barbary and her stepbrother Raoul, have run wild together, associating with the defiant and dangerous local Maquis (Resistance) who defied the Germans and betrayed the collaborators. Here, Barbary learnt about danger, betrayal and death, and in the hands of the Gestapo; sexual assault. A free spirited artist, hedonistic Helen’s attention these days is largely taken up with Roland the young son she had with her second husband, Barbary is often ignored. With her husband recently drowned in highly suspicious circumstances, Helen decides to pack Barbary off to England to her father and stepmother, Barbary’s elder brother who had remained in London after his mother fled to France, arrives to collect his wild and untaught sister. Raoul travels with her, packed off to an uncle, Helen freed at last of two responsibilities.
Barbary is seventeen, though appears much younger – her childlike rebellion, and search for her place of safety making her vulnerable as if her development to adulthood has been arrested by her wartime experiences. There were moments when I found it hard to see Barbary as a seventeen-year-old – although teenagers of 1946 were not the teenagers we know today. A few times, Macaulay uses the word children for Barbary and her (albeit slightly younger) stepbrother – the word jarred a little for me – though why should it? – teenagers are more adult now than then, no doubt the reason for that word seeming inappropriate to a modern reader.
Scruffy, stubborn and untamed Barbary is not ready for the mixture of formal, English politeness and bomb damaged austerity that exists in post-war London. Barrister Sir Gulliver Deniston; Barbary’s father is stiff and starchy, his new wife the always correct, tweedy Pamela is very conventional, about as unlike Helen as it is possible to be. Both are shocked by Barbary’s unconventional wildness, the results of Helen’s rather neglectful parenting. There’s a feeling that Sir Gulliver has not entirely recovered from Helen’s desertion of him before the war, while Pamela resents any reference to the woman she feels unable to compete with.
“Suddenly the bells of St. Paul’s clashed out, drowning them in sweet, hoarse, rocking clamour. Barbary began to dance, her dark hair flapping in the breeze as she spun about. Raoul joined her; they took hands, snapping the fingers of the other hand above their heads; it was a dance of Provence, and they sand a Collioure fisherman’s song in time to it.
The bells stopped. The children stood still, gazing down on a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs.”
Desperately unhappy; Barbary looks for somewhere she can feel safe, that makes sense to a girl who ran with the Maquis, instructed by them in sabotage and thievery. Craving the world that she has left behind, Barbary finds a wilderness in the wastelands created by the bombs which rained down upon the streets around St. Paul’s. Here Barbary finds similarities to the life she led in France, meeting an odd collection of characters, hiding from policeman, stealing from shops. Invited to a shooting party in the Scottish Highlands, Sir Gulliver and Pamela whisk Barbary off before she has barely got used to being away from France. Barbary raises a few eyebrows with her unconventional behaviour, finally, running off back to London, and the ruined buildings where each day she escapes the claustrophobic atmosphere of her father’s house. Still running around with Raoul, the pair take over the ruins of an abandoned flat, while Barbary paints in the ruins of a church. Their new friends; deserters and thieves, people looking for a place to hide. Getting into rather more trouble than she bargained for, Barbary ensures that her father and stepmother will have to entertain her mother, who finally rushes to be with the daughter she had so brutally thrust from her.
In The World my Wilderness we have guilt and redemption. The hurts created by the ravages of war in people and their places are explored with great compassion and understanding. Macaulay knows what it is to be young, and also what it is to be lost. show less

This is a beautifully descriptive, possibly too much so, novel about Barbary Deniston a 17 year old trying to cope with life in 1946 London. Barbary was raised in France and allowed to run with the Resistance for all of her teen years. She and her younger step brother learn to steal, shoot, hide and generally harass the occupying Germans. When peace comes her mother sends her to live in London with her barrister father and his young wife. After her wild years Barbary cannot adjust to a structured existence where she is expected to act like a proper English school girl. Instead of attending the Slade School of Art, she finds the life of freedom and excitement she craves in bombed-out Cheapside where she hooks up with the dredges of show more society and acts as though the London bobbies are the Gestapo and stealing is the accepted way to acquire what one needs to survive.

This is a novel where the adults have aborgated responsibility for their young. The convenient excuse was that the war turned everything upsidedown. Good people did bad things to survive and criminals became heroes because they fought the Germans. Still, I found myself losing patience with the adult excuses for not watching their children. Barbary's mother is this free spirit, the type that can do anything she desires merely because she desires it and she is appealing and not judgmental. She is the earth mother who is content with a half feral daughter because Barbary is happy. When Barbary may have done something to go against her mother's contentment, Helen is more than happy to dump the girl on her ex-husband. Barbary's father also allows Barbary unique freedom while she is adjusting to her new life. Only when she actually steals from a family member do all these warning bells go off in his head and he decides to act somewhat like a father. Too bad he didn't check to see if she was actually attending school. In essence, the adults failed her and Barbary is very much on her own. Of course, she does what is familiar to her which is running free, hating authority, and living in the imaginary world of the London marquis.

The writing is five star, especially the lyric passages about the ruins of Cheapside, but because I had no patience with Barbary or her family and ended up not caring what happened to any of them, I very personally give this a three star review. I am sure many readers will not be as exasperated with the characters as I was and give it the five star rating the writing deserves. show less

Set in 1946, both France and England are dealing with the aftermath of the Second World War. At 17, Barbary Deniston has lived in the shadow of war most of her life. She lives in France with her mother, a self-centered woman more focused on her romantic entanglements than on raising her daughter. Barbary had the freedom to mix with the local Resistance, and has seen more than most her age. When her mother decides to ship her off to her father in England, Barbary struggles to adjust to a radically different culture, resists those who can help her, and falls in with a rough crowd. Consequences ensue.

This novel had some interesting characters and there were some moments of humor and depth, but I also found the plot somewhat contrived. show more Nevertheless, the examination of both France and England post-war made it a good fit for a theme read. show less

This gripping novel set in post-WWII novel shows that Macaulay's talents are not confined to satire. Following the fortunes of a young girl sent from France to live with her barrister father in England, the novel is beautifully descriptive, capturing the collective post-war trauma of two nations.