The Wolf Border
by Sarah Hall
First posted July 2018
Some novels smudge the boundary of their worlds. Any thing might happen. It is real magic.
There is a section within the book where the protagonist Rachel is in the woods with her not-quite-toddler infant, tracking wolves. It is tense and her actions feel a bit foolish, but it is not frantic. Not yet. Getting to that point certainly seemed reasonable while it was happening. Events slowly ramp up to crescendo at a moment where she leaves the bassinet that contains her child alone to examine the corpse of an animal. It becomes a scene of gothic horror:
The crows clamour above her. She is invading. They have guarded the prize and want it back. From the paddock she hears a thin wail. She rights herself and walks toward [her son]. He is standing up in the hollow looking at the copse, his head and shoulders unburrowed. He is trying to climb out but the sides are too steep, he cannot get traction. For a second she expects to see Merle [a wolf] appear behind him, pick him up, the straps of his dungarees clasped between her teeth, and carry him off, her abandoned, beloved son. The vision is so clear that she almost panics, almost shouts. His cries carry across the field. The pasture is empty. The sky is enormous above him. The wolves are watching or already gone.
The clenched pace induced by the clipped sentences, the pages of panting tension after rather languid novel; it makes the heart race.
This draws a subtle line across The Wolf Border, carving out a space of high literature within a compelling novel. Rachel sees as the reader sees. She constructs—her fear palpable—a dramatic scenario from nothing. What is writing, what is reading, other than that self-same creation? Both are visions wrought by solely by ink. Rachel during her pregnancy gestates more than child:
A video screen plays on a loop, instructions on breastfeeding, latching, angles, and advertisements for pushchairs. The situation feels unreal—she does not belong among the expecting and the mothers of the world—yet here she is. She has been given a thick maternity pack from the midwife at the GP’s surgery, and has leafed through. Her bladder is full; she needs the toilet but is not allowed to relieve herself. Nothing about the situation is comfortable.
She births an understanding of what fiction gives, holds it against what readers must add to make it possible. It is uncomfortable, it is unreal: we are there with her; in the hospital; in childbirth; standing of the wolf carcass, alone in the woods; and we are nowhere, reading on the train, in the bath, on the couch. Real, unreal.
The highest moment of drama is when the (view spoiler) There is room for doubt, the true cause is unknowable and unneeded, yet it seems undeniable that the person responsible (view spoiler) The anxiety of something going wrong; the tension of it being solved. Both conflict and resolution must needs be created by the author of the work; within this lambent impossibility a story resides: “The only wound is life, recklessly creating it, knowing that it will never be safe, it will never last; it will only ever be real.”
One of many tangential mysteries—which isn’t set up as a mystery, simply an event that happened before the novel that Rachel sometimes ponders—is of an aristocrat and a plane crash. Near the conclusion of The Wolf Border, Rachel must get into a helicopter piloted by this man:
She is not afraid of flying. But this feels like madness, an event choreographed to put an end to it all, to conclude the entire year-long fiasco. She’s never going to see her son again. She will never see him grow up or be able to tell him anything that matters – what he meant to her, who his father is, that he was a gift, the greatest of all gifts, and she could hardly believe he was hers.
Too late does the tangent snap into focus, shift from authorial bid for verisimilitude to crucial foreshadowing. Except, again, these extrapolations are Rachel’s fears made manifest, representations of a reader’s sense of what should or does happen all too often in literature, expectations imposing themselves upon the text. The wolf does not appear. The helicopter does not crash. The story is not real.
Before the novel begins, the first epigraph reads, “Susiraja (Finnish) – Literally ‘wolf border’: the boundary between the capital region and the rest of the country. The name suggests everything outside the border is wilderness.” Bound to words on a page, imagination is respectable. It is literature. It is culture. When imaginings leave the page and become fears? When those fears run amok within our minds?
That is wilderness.