2024/144: The Wilding — Ian McDonald

The beauty and terror that welled out of this place took hold of Yeats’s mystic, holy Ireland, held it up and ripped it apart. Beneath its torn skin was old Ireland, deep Ireland, the Ireland buried in the bogs and beneath the fields of grazing, turned to leather and knot and iron-oak. Waiting down there. [loc. 2304]

Lough Carrow used to be a working bog: now it's a rewilding project, left to nature for two years during the Covid pandemic. Some of the locals mutter suspiciously about wolves being sneaked in while nobody was looking. Pádraig runs the Wilding, but most of the novel's from the point of view of Lisa, a young woman with a murky past, a stolen copy of Yeats' Selected Poetry and a place awaiting her at UCL. Lisa oversleeps after celebrating the latter, and thus gets landed with wild sleepover -- five twelve-year-olds and their three teachers, trekking through the bog and camping in its remotest corner.

The kids are a handful: all on medication, with mental health issues, traumatic histories and/or bad attitudes. But there are things even worse than adolescent children in the bog, and once Lisa and her cohort set off the pace of the story (if not of their trek) is headlong.

I heard the author reading from this at Worldcon and was gripped, though The Wilding was not quite what I was expecting. Lisa is a splendid character, backstory and backbone and some attitude of her own: her interactions with the kids shift in tone over the course of the novel but are always credible and human. The kids themselves are at first annoying but become individual, even likeable, with distinctive voices and very different perceptions of the world. The descriptions of the natural environment, of the silence and non-silence of the bog, of light on water and blurry motion at the edge of vision, are spectacular. And there are echoes of Yeats' poems throughout.

There's a reference to Pádraig 'checking for signs of incipient folk horror' when he touches base with the villagers, but The Wilding's horror is something older and weirder than a few peculiar locals. Some of those locals are very peculiar: I'm sure Dom Purvis and his maps and zones is a callout to Holdstock's Mythago Wood... McDonald has been one of my favourite authors for many years: though his scope here is perhaps narrower than in his best-known (SF) novels, his prose is as glorious as ever.