Possibly the discovery of my reading year (already in mid-January) – magnificent writing. Halfway through the novel I started to slow down – simply did not want it to end, but secretly also wondered how it would end. Sarah could have simply continued writing about Rachel and her men (both hairy and furry) in one endless series – I would have continued reading it, cherishing it, ruminating on it, until the end of sojourn on planet earth. And yet the ending of this novel resulted in some of the most frantic and emotionally spell-bound reading I ever did. I didn’t want it to end, I wanted the pack of wolves to survive, I wanted to know more about Rachel’s trip to Idaho.

So what makes it all so addictive? I suspect the story touches on many themes in my own life. There is also the intergenerational perspective which gives it depth. And then there is the wolf and the public outcry around it (last year over a 100,000 sheep in NL have died as a result of a disease called blue tongue, but the less than two hundred sheep killed by wolves are the one thing people can’t stop talking about). The wolf stands for the wild, for something called nature, in a shape we don’t know anymore. All control freaks kick into action the moment the wolf does not behave like a domesticated dog. It spreads fear. Whereas when I met one in the wild, last year, on the heather fields of my youth, I was just intrigued by this big dog walking so casually across the forest track I was hiking on. Such slick movements. Such command, so sly. Magical. The same applies to Hall’s deft treatment of the wider ramifications of the theme of re-introducing wilderness – borders, identity, fear of the uncontrolled, assertion of power and control (over women, over one’s vices and addictions, over one’s nation, over one’s traumas, over one’s life).

So what is the story? Rachel, a single woman in her late thirties, happily works for a reclusive wilderness centre that monitors the movement of two packs of wolves across Idaho and Canada. Life is simple, spartan and fun with changing crews of volunteers, a hostile environment (hunters and farmers killing and snaring wolves) and a small but committed community of conservationists. Rachel is head hunted for a bold conservationist experiment by an old fashioned Lord in Cumbria, Rachel’s place of birth. The flight and first stay in ten years in Cumbria is paid for by the Lord. Rachel meets her mom for the first time in ages and manages to avoid her estranged half-brother. The job interview confirms her fears – the Lord is do good’er, who wants to create an expansive keep for a couple of wolves, re-introducing the species after an absence of 600 years. It is not half as interesting as the wolf project she is involved in, in Idaho – it is something between a zoo and wilderness. Rachel returns to Idaho, but helps out the Lord by arranging the ferrying of a couple of wolves from a rehab clinic in Rumania. But then her mom dies. Her half-brother’s wife arranges for Rachel’s absence from the funeral (while she is snowed in, in her camp in Idaho). And Rachel gets pregnant as a result of a one-night stand with a local colleague. She sort of doesn’t know how to handle the new situation and decides to return to Cumbria, taking up the Lord’s generous package to become his project manager.

The novel then takes us through all the steps for a successful integration and reproduction of a couple of wolves and their four pups on the Lord’s estate in the lake district. Rachel settles in on a cottage on the estate, she mends her relationship with both her half-brother (who turns out to be a drug addict) and her sister in law, she forms her own team of dedicated conservationists (hiring a South African zen ranger, recruiting the Lord’s daughter as dedicated volunteer), she even manages to start a long lasting affair with the local vet (who turned widow two years before her return to Cumbria). She deftly handles the local protests against the project, and manages both her own and the wolves pregnancies. Her baby son Charles proves pivotal in the recovery process of her half brother. All things settle and stabilize into a pleasant rhythm and then… Disaster strikes – the wolves escape from an open gate.

In a dramatic finale, Hall describes the hunt for the six wolves on the run and the media circus which emerges around it. Only then Rachel perceives that this is actually part of the Lord’s plan – the wolves were meant to escape and flee to the Scottish Highlands in an enforced process of rewilding. Scotland has turned independent and the wolves become an emblem of the new nation – a way to distinguish itself from Great Britain. Rather than catching the pack, the Lord in his helicopter hopes to run them across the border and arrange for a radical environmental policy of the new nation.

Sarah Hall’s writing has a lot in common with Barbara Kingsolver’s, but where Kingsolver is conscribed by American niceties, writing in a polished, politically correct manner, Hall’s writing is much more raw and profound, by being both sexually explicit and by engaging with doubt and trauma in a much more profound, in the face, manner. In movie terms Kingsolver is Disney, and Hall is art movie. Gosh, let’s hope she writes a lot more. ( )

Hall has outdone herself. This is a well layered novel about animals, extinction, the environment, anti-environmentalists, motherhood, and more. ( )

The prose in this is stunning, but it’s a solid DNF due the infuriating habit of literally zero dialogue markers/punctuation. I don’t like it at the best of times, and at the worst of times lack of punctuation along with attribution is just confusing and jarring. This was one of the worst of times.

If you can get past that, the prose is worth it. ( )

Well, it's Sarah Hall, so I enjoyed the language and story-telling, but this is just a character/situation I have a hard time maintaining an interest in and empathy for. ( )

I am still reflecting on this novel, and trying to decide why I did not like it.

It is unquestionable well written. I have read a couple of Sarah Hall’s previous novels (most notably her excellent ‘The Electric Michelangelo’), and the writing here matches the brilliance evinced in them. She is especially strong when conveying the natural world (specifically here wolves and their finely tuned relationship with their environment), and some of her descriptions were breath-taking.

The plot surrounds the return of Rachel, the protagonist, to her native Cumbria after having lived abroad for years, working on various conservation projects observing and protecting wolves. Rachel had grown up in a fractured family, and has damaged relationships with her ageing mother and younger brother. She returns to help an immensely wealthy peer who wans to reintroduce wolves to a large expanse of his estate in Cumbria. Predictably, such a project has evoked strident opposition from various interest groups with whom Rachel has to engage. She finds this difficult as she shares some of their misgivings about the project, although she has been won over by the grandiose aims, yet also the attention to detail, that have been brought to the exercise.

The plot was find - I struggled more with the characters, striving without success to find any for whom I could identify even a shred of empathy. The early chapters are set in freezing areas of North America, marvellously described by Sarah Hall – perhaps too evocatively, as the novel left me very cold and unreceptive.

I am sure that my indifference to this book is unfair, and I may try to read it again in a few months to see whether the manifold positive aspects have a stronger impact with me. ( )