Review: The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (Spoiler-Free)
The world, the girl knew, was worse than savage, the world was unmoved.
I struggled with the writing style of this book when I first started it. Groff has a propensity to use four adverbs in place of one effective verb (e.g. something like "ran quickly, swiftly, and with haste" instead of "dashed") and, at least in this novel, slips into passive voice very frequently. That being said, the further I got into the story, the more convinced I became that this (at least the passive voice) was intentional.
This is a tale of macro themes on a micro scale. Therefore, the third person omniscient narration is a fitting choice and I think that what I had initially been reading as passive was actually a deliberate choice in perspective.
The whole novel centers around nature, the 'vaster wilds' of the Earth, both in the time that the book takes place and in the inevitable future. If one views this story through the lens of this all-powerful yet amoral force, Groff's style becomes a lot more fitting.
Writing a colonialism novel from this angle reminds me of Markus Zusak's idea to write a WWII novel narrated by Death. In times so divided by every difference imaginable, centering an identifiable, unifying force is a clever decision.
The omniscient narration allows for several stories to be told within this one novel, but at the heart of it, we follow one girl's journey to survive in the wildnerness. While I generally enjoy survival stories, this one stands out not for the series of events that unfold, but the shift in philosophy. The portion I enjoyed most was the last third, as our protagonist begins to question her own perspective of life itself and whether or not she, or her people, are the at the center of it. This realization—that her way of life, her beliefs, her religion are not singular, not the exclusive answer to every question—further complements the omniscient perspective. From nature's point of view, there is no right. There is no wrong. There just is. So what is the point in isolation?
