I was expecting a book of some originality just from my initial browse, and I was not disappointed. This is an unusual read, beautifully crafted, which makes land and landscape the key protagonist.
Our human protagonist is Lamentations Callat, sometimes called Girl, Wench, Zed (because it is the last and littlest), so it comes as no surprise to the reader that she was a serving girl, plucked out of an orphanage, taken into a big house on the whim of its mistress, and enjoying the benefits (some education, good food, etc) and suffering the travails (the husband and son and male friends sexually abusing female servants as is their right, as they deem it.)
But although this novel contains some lovely indictments of poverty, class, and colonialism, at its heart is the story of raw survival. Brought to the New World by her employers, Lamentation needs to flee the settlement and simply grabs a few essentials, and runs into the winter wilderness. In this wilderness, there are the original inhabitants, the Powhatan and Pamunkey, feared by white men (and of course also killed and exterminated by them). Although brought up devoutly Christian, the girl realises
the blight of the English will come to this remoteness as well. It will spread into this land and infect this land and devour the people who were here first; it will slaughter them, diminish them. The hunger inside the god of my people can only be sated by domination. They will dominate until there is nothing left, then they will eat themselves. I am not of them. I will not be (p242).
It is strange how wise and knowing and intuitive this girl from the city is, in the wilderness. When she runs away, she is only 17 or 18, but she survives by herself, alone, all the vicissitudes of weather, disease, pain, loneliness, starvation, and finds beauty and peace even amidst all the hardships. A lot of the novel is the beautifully told tale of how the girl runs, how she hides from pursuers, how she manages her scraps of resources, how she learns to survive. There is some trial and error, but for most part, she manages astoundingly well, to do all the needful like building shelters and catching food, as if she were born to it.
The beauty of the novel lies in the details, especially those observed by the girl. Maybe it is her attention to detail which key to her survival in the wilds. She makes best use of whatever she has, especially the few things she snatched up before she ran away. The care she takes of her things is touching and charming.
In the firelight, she took all of her good things out of her sack to care for them, because they were the only friends she had and they each had begun to grow some character. The hatchet was blunt but as faithful as a dog, the knife was two-faced and angry but always ready, the flint was taciturn, the sack bemused, the coverlets pacific, the pewter cup over-eager and a little greedy. Off her feet she took the twin boots, her best two friends and most doughty, even though the left boot had a nail working its way up from under the sole, and the nail worried her mightily. She picked the clinging seeds and sticks and mud off her cloak, and dug the boots out of their thick coating of filth, then she polished them with the hem of an interior gown until in the small light they gleamed (p77).
The telling alternates between details of beauty, and details of pain and suffering and fear and more pain that she experiences. But for most part, the pain is that of the body; it feels almost as if the girl has traded the sufferings civilisation would impose or inflict on such a poor, vulnerable thing as she is, and the sufferings which occur naturally in the wilderness to any creature, human or otherwise.
She elects the latter, but also knows it takes humans to keep oneself human,
she was sick unto her soul for want of love and human conversation (p240)
But in her humility, she recognises that she manages to exist here by the grace of the original inhabitants, because even after decades, “she was still a stranger here, ; she had imposed herself upon this place, and their acceptance of the fact of her was a gift of grace enough” (ibid).
This novel marvels at the beauty of the natural world, its harshness, its bounty, its glory, and the resourcefulness of even one small human being to survive all this. The writing is so charming the reader willingly suspends disbelief of whether there can be such a girl wonder as this one, and is happy to be lost in the magnificence of the ‘vaster wilds’, for which this novel is so aptly named.
Review title from A Forest Hymn, by William Cullen Bryant
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