![Freedom under the skies: horses on a rural American farm](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/09/12/TELEMMGLPICT000098931792_16945136646370_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqg0QhGUrJBLC1cMiJLC7a79HhMh81Y8GqX3ipA8YMo0k.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Strap in for a thrilling chase across the American wilderness
Lauren Groff’s new novel, The Vaster Wilds, is a rivetingly tense 17th-century tale of a girl bidding for freedom from a colonial fort
![Freedom under the skies: horses on a rural American farm](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/09/12/TELEMMGLPICT000098931792_16945136646370_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqg0QhGUrJBLC1cMiJLC7a79HhMh81Y8GqX3ipA8YMo0k.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Winter 1610, in the new Jamestown colony of Virginia, and the inhabitants are dropping like flies: bitterly cold, starving and diseased. One snowy night, under the cover of darkness, a desperate young servant girl rejects the inadequate protections of the fort, and flees into “the great and terrible wilderness”.
The opening chapters of The Vaster Wilds, a new novel by the three-time National Book Award finalist Lauren Groff, unfurl at the frenzied pace of the very best escape narratives. Think Barry England’s 1968 novel Figures in a Landscape, but without the menacing helicopter – just a “sharp and slinking” soldier hot on the girl’s heels, wild animals, treacherous weather and terrain, and understandably unfriendly Native Americans. Women writing in this genre have traditionally been few and far between, as are female protagonists, which gives the novel the feel of something revelatory.
Not that there isn’t precedent for the girl’s bid for freedom. Later in the narrative, she recalls being told, as a child, various tales “of women who had run away and, in running had become other things”. They included “a beautiful maiden, ravished and punished for the violation by becoming a white heifer that leapt a river. Girl become sunflower. Girl become dove. Girl become raven. Girls, all the many girls fleeing from pursuers, girls who were turned, even in their flight, into trees.”
No such magical metamorphosis awaits Groff’s fleet-footed heroine. Nevertheless, a different kind of transmogrification occurs: her bruised and bloody female body becomes a metaphor for the land she traverses – pillaged, plundered, raped and renamed. (Her own backstory is revealed piecemeal, in the form of memories, nightmares and fever dreams: an orphan from the poorhouse, she has known little happiness or love.)
In looking to the past, Groff’s latest novel is in step with her last, Matrix (2021). In that, she took the real-life figure of Marie de France, a 12th-century female poet about whom little is known, and depicted her as the charismatic leader of a sisterhood of nuns. Matrix in no way sanitised or sugar-coated history – the muddy fields of Angleterre, to which Groff’s Marie is unceremoniously dispatched from the French court, are awash with filth and pestilence, death and decay – but the overarching atmosphere of the novel was one of sensuality and grace as the steadfast Marie built a female-centric fortress.
![The Vaster Wilds are published by Hutchinson Heinemann](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/09/12/TELEMMGLPICT000348976990_16945139995940_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqVLvNQ4vBlzywIJ9onYGlivSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
The Vaster Wilds might be set in the new world, but it’s no utopia. There are glimpses of the divine here, namely in the might and majesty of the natural world: Groff’s prose throughout is anointed with an agitated, almost transcendent intensity. But ultimately this is meagre respite from what’s otherwise a litany of pain, suffering and barbarity. Even the beauty is dangerous: trees frozen after an atrocious storm, ready to rain down deadly icicles “sending up shimmers of ice splinters into the air, which formed golden clouds as they caught the light and drifted off in a great high shining fleece into the wind”. And this, in turn, has a strange, uneasy effect on the reader. Being plunged into so tactile and tender a portrait of an environment that’s still as-yet-unsullied, when all around us today images of the destruction of the natural world abound, induces a giddying, guilt-fuelled whiplash.
Groff described the writing of Matrix as an act of resistance. The book arose, at least in part, as what she called an attempt to “get as far away from Trump’s America as possible”. Unsurprisingly, many of the struggles facing us today found their way into that book, by means of echoes and reflections in the world she created. The Vaster Wilds builds on that project, using historical fiction as a mirror through which to better understand our own times, and to tell those stories omitted from the official historical record. In setting her alongside the likes of Hernan Diaz, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Trust (2022), Groff’s book makes her one of an exciting new generation of American novelists using fiction to rewrite the most pervasive founding myths of the so-called Land of Liberty.
The Vaster Wilds is published by Hutchinson Heinemann at £20. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books