The Word for Woman Is Wilderness is unlike any published work I have read, in ways that are beguiling, audacious and occasionally irritating. It’s a British debut in which 19-year-old Erin leaves her Midlands home and heads for Alaska by land and sea in order to write a feminist narrative about the wilderness: a revision of the works of Jack London and John Muir for the millennial generation. Along the way, she muses on space travel, mutually assured destruction, climate change and physics.
Eschewing air travel for aesthetic and environmental reasons, she takes berths on cargo and research ships across the north Atlantic, pausing for a few weeks in Iceland, Greenland and north-eastern Canada before setting off on a trans-Canadian odyssey of hitchhiking, eventually finding herself in a hut in Alaska’s Denali national park. Erin struggles to use her Mooncup while dog sledding in Greenland, is rescued by a wise Native American woman after running away from a creepy truck driver outside Winnipeg, and sleeps with a nice boy near Edmonton (but leaves him because “historically it is women that have had to deal with desertion”, and she doesn’t want to be distracted from her quest by romance). Erin is making a video documentary of her journey, a production that sits in uneasy meta-narrative relation to the book. As the first-person narrator of the novel and watcher of herself through her own camera, she is aware of her own tropes, possessing an intelligence that repeatedly turns on itself and yet clings to first principles in an appropriately adolescent way – nature, women, Native Americans: good; patriarchy, men, technology: bad.
The narrator’s self-consciousness is both a pleasure and an annoyance to the reader, and the success of the novel depends partly on how far we think Andrews is sending up Erin’s coming-of-age quest. Wondering if carrying equipment and supplies taints the purity of the wilderness experience, Erin moves swiftly from the recognition that going unequipped “would not be a survival technique, but a probable death-experiment” to reflecting that “I am writing to be read, so again the ‘solitude’ is tainted by inverse voyeurism. Go tell that to Thoreau and Heidegger and the Unabomber.” Of course there is no reason why a 19-year-old who has just finished college wouldn’t be on easy terms with Heidegger, Niels Bohr and Rachel Carson, at home with astrophysics and 19th-century American history. Erudite teenagers do exist, but in my experience they are usually in better control of grammar and have a wider vocabulary in daily life than Erin. Her tone lurches from scholarly discourses on cell structure, with diagrams, to a laconic dependence on swearing and the passive voice to communicate emotion. The disconnection between Andrews’ scholarliness and the constructed naivety of her narrator creates a gap that sometimes threatens the novel’s integrity.
But the mixture of literary forms is part of Andrews’ response to the obvious question, which Erin is bright enough to confront repeatedly, if not to resolve: if heading west into the wilderness is a patriarchal idea based on the conviction that the human (male) relationship with the natural world is essentially violent and dominant, what is a feminist doing alone in Alaska? Is she merely repeating the male explorer’s quest to find himself, only this time with a Mooncup in her pocket, or doing something genuinely radical? There isn’t really an answer, but rather a disassembling of the question that, for those in the know, rehearses the sometimes tedious dilemmas of feminist eco-criticism. Erin flirts with the idea that women are part of nature, at one with the natural world and similarly victimised, before noting that animals don’t make documentaries and that the identification of women with animals conforms nicely to patriarchal thinking.
Between meditations on ecological and gender theory, we have sections of script from the documentary, providing less abstract accounts of Erin’s encounters with other people, some of them hilarious. I particularly enjoyed Erin and her friend Naaja’s parody of Bear Grylls in Greenland: “If you don’t have a frozen deer leg, use your initiative … (she takes to hitting the ice with a stick).” Episodes of more novelistic past-tense narrative move the quest narrative onwards through Erin’s recounted dreams of Rachel Carson and Yuri Gagarin as well as her hiking and hitchhiking adventures. Erin’s politics are millennial: one does not become a woman but is born one; adults are just the people who messed up the world. The few characters over 30 are racist, sexist and/or destroyers of the environment.
The Word for Woman … rises to its own challenges in engaging intellectually as well as wholeheartedly with its questions about gender, genre and the concept of wilderness. The novel displays wide reading, clever writing and amusing dialogue. It doesn’t really matter if middle-aged readers are annoyed by the ageism, teenspeak and reinvention of various political wheels – it’s not meant for us.
Sarah Moss’s latest novel is The Tidal Zone (Granta).
• The Word for Woman Is Wilderness is published by Serpent’s Tail. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
