![]() ![]() ![]() Like how the Community all used to have 10 fingers and toes. For all its horror, it’s an understated moment – there is no keening lament, just cricket song and the soft tread of coyotes.Ĭook is adept at matter-of-factly deploying unadorned detail to deadpanning, gut-plummeting effect. ![]() Cook is adept at matter-of-factly deploying unadorned detail to deadpanning, gut-plummeting effectĪt the novel’s start, they have been in the Wilderness for three years and its harrowing opening scene tells you all you need to know about the extreme toll it’s taken: alone, Bea crouches with her stillborn baby, covering her with wilted leaves and sagebrush branches. Sinister allusions to uninhabitable regions such as “the Heat Belt”, and to the fact that doctors no longer choose to specialise in paediatrics, sharpen a picture of a planet brought to its knees by the human race and of a human race at the “precipitous end” of its timeline. Any unbuilt-upon land has been harnessed to service a swollen population bunkered down in overcrowded high-rises, creating plains of greenhouses, seas of windmills, rolling landfills. ![]() Helped by Bea’s partner, an academic who is also part of “the Community”, they signed up because five-year-old Agnes was being poisoned by polluted air back in a megalopolis known only as “the City”. ![]()
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