Novels with Wilderness Settings

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13 books

The wilderness is a universally recognizable place to human beings, even if we’ve been born and raised in cities; it is our primal place of origin, and its patterns and spectacles are written into our DNA. This matters in literature, fiction especially, because stories set in the compellingly described primal wilderness tap into deeply resonant emotional responses. By writing and reading novels that acknowledge our inseparability from nature, no matter how dark the novel (and novels set in the wilderness do tend to be dark), we engage in a ritual of gratitude and healing. This kind of ritual is hard to come by in our screen-addicted twenty-first-century human society, and we urgently need more of it. We need novels that recognize and re-mythologize our place in nature. Novels that celebrate the beautiful, concrete, in-the-moment specificity of our existence on this planet. These kinds of novels can inspire us to affirm and strengthen our essential entanglement with nature, and in the process of writing and reading them, hopefully, we will become better stewards of the complex network of the planetary life that sustains us. As a bonus (full disclosure), I include my own soon-to-be-released wilderness adventure novel (which also happens to be a post-apocalypse time travel story), The Afterlife Project.

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Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad, 1990

In his seminal adventure narrative, Conrad treats the wilderness as an important antagonist, if not the main antagonist. The wilderness plays a key role in the central conflict of the story; it is an ever-present, irresistible, crushing force. Marlow empathizes with Kurtz’s enslavement by the dark power at the heart of the jungle; he feels overwhelmed by it himself. And the return to England is no escape; when Marlow visits Kurtz’s fiancée he hears the whispered cry, “The horror! The horror!” and the dark wilderness presses in all around.

The old man and the sea

Ernest Hemingway, 1975

We sometimes forget how revolutionary The Old Man and the Sea was when it first came out in 1952. After all, it’s a short novel about an elderly man out in a boat by himself. It contains no love story, not much in the way of plot, and hardly any real dialogue between humans. The old man talks to himself, to the fish, to a lost bird, to his own hand—and the thing is, these are really interesting conversations. The old man is interacting with these specific manifestations of nature—with the ocean wilderness and its denizens—with an intimacy, respect, and love that is too often absent in humankind’s attitude towards the nature that surrounds and sustains us. The Old Man and the Sea celebrates, in the course of an indelible and enduring fictional story, a beautiful ocean wilderness that has been considerably degraded in the seven decades since the book was written. It is a novel that models the kind of outlook on the global environment that we all need to adopt, and quickly, if we hope to survive as a species beyond our current age of environmental crisis. It is a timeless work of art and, in my opinion, one of the greatest wilderness novels ever written.

The Inheritors

William Golding, 1962

In this vivid 1955 novel of the Upper Paleolithic wilderness by the author of the better-known Lord of the Flies, a band of sympathetic Neanderthals is overcome by a newly arrived group of brutally intelligent Homo sapiens. It’s a haunting story, one that raises questions about events that might have occurred during the rise of our species while providing a few disquieting hints about what the future may hold. But it is the primeval Eurasian wilderness, brought to vibrant and unforgettable life by Golding’s inimitable writing, that makes this novel a dark, haunting, underappreciated classic.

The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien, 2005

Yes, Lord of the Rings. The Shire and Mordor, Fangorn Forest and Moria, Rivendell and Lothlórien. As Frodo’s party makes its way steadily eastward across the wilderness of Middle Earth, evil begins to assert itself with ever greater force. Terrifying ringwraiths assail the party and wound Frodo with a clammy blade; flocks of crows and other flying creatures careen menacingly through the sky above their heads; orcs pursue them through the abandoned mines of Moria, and a powerful monster drags the wizard Gandalf down into the abyss. Meanwhile, the dread penumbra of Mordor encroaches upon every quarter of the sky, and it is apparent that even fortresses of light, such as Rivendell and Lothlórien, must eventually succumb to the rising tide of shadow. The Peter Jackson movies, filmed on location in New Zealand, did a fairly good job of representing the vivid wilderness of Middle Earth, but the fact is, film simply can’t accomplish the things with landscape that fiction can. The well-drawn wilderness landscapes of Tolkien’s masterpiece become rooted in your soul in ways that even the best computer-enhanced cinematography can never surpass.

Ceremony

Leslie Marmon Silko, 2020

Ceremony, by Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko, a member of the “Native American Renaissance” that included such writers as M Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, is a classic American novel of healing and redemption set in the Northen New Mexico wilderness. Silko’s protagonist is a Pueblo man who returns from the Pacific theater of WWII profoundly damaged by his exposure to violence and evil. The “ceremony” of the title is about the redemption that can be found in regularly communing with a specific home place. Silko had a profoundly intimate knowledge of the desert landscape of northern New Mexico and her love for it is infectious. This powerful novel shows us how a reverent and mindful approach to nature is both a way of healing ourselves and a method for creating immersive stories in the midst of a planetary environmental crisis that we all must face together.

Blood Meridian

Or the Evening Redness in the West

Cormac McCarthy, 2010

A group of men rides through the desert wilderness of the 19th-century American southwest, engaging in vividly described acts of brutality. Doesn’t sound like much of a novel, does it? But in the end it got to me, this book, sticking in my craw like Melville, luminous and prophetic. As in Moby Dick, much of the power of Blood Meridian flows from the terrible beauty of the language it uses to describe its setting. McCarthy’s sentences hit like a dire wind blowing through every chapter, sweeping the reader up in the bloody ride across the desert with Glanton’s murderous crew in part because the diction echoes that movement, conveying a simmering burden of suppressed emotion that is liable to boil over into random acts of brutality and unbridled fits of evil.

Fools Crow

James Welch, 1987

The late Blackfeet novelist James Welch was another member of the Native American Renaissance. Set in 1870 in the northern Rocky Mountain wilderness, Fool’s Crow tells the absorbing though often wrenching coming of age of eighteen-year-old Pikunis Blackfeet White Man’s Dog/Fool’s Crow during the disastrous arrival on the scene of the Napikwan (White Man). Welch was a beautiful writer, and his descriptions of the high plains wilderness, fueled by images of dreams and the uncanny, are impossible for the imagination to resist. Here’s a random sample to give you an idea. “He pushed aside the boughs covering the entrance and looked out into the grey light. He had slept well in his small shelter, but now his breath told him it was very cold -- and still. He heard the croak again and looked up into the trees. The sky was lighter above them. The granite face of the great mountain loomed through the trees, and the yellow light of the Sun Chief struck the very top. He rolled out and stood up, and there in the pine where he had placed the meat sat a fat raven.”

Euphoria

Lily King, 2014

An intellectual love story set in the steamy, Heart-of-Darkness-like atmosphere of 1930s New Guinea. Euphoria was apparently inspired by the story of Margaret Mead, but it's pure fiction: dark, enriching, and a real page-turner. The last quarter of the novel, in particular, was impossible to put down, and I found myself quite emotionally caught up in the ill-fated love triangle between these three anthropologists: the lovelorn, desperately lonely Bankson, the thwarted, mean-spirited Fen and the lovely, brilliant, charismatic Nell. This is a masterful, gripping, highly immersive novel—one is transported to a lost region of the world in the company of fascinating characters engaged in deeply absorbing moral, ethical, and personal struggles.

Into the Savage Country

Shannon Burke, 2015

Shannon Burke brings his considerable descriptive powers to bear on the almost unimaginably distant setting of the far western America in the 1820s, reanimating a vanished wilderness for a reading experience that is both riveting and exhilarating. Burke resists the impulse to give contemporary readers an ironic, literary, postmodern take on a “moribund” genre—the Western adventure story—and still succeeds in creating a book that feels thoroughly, effortlessly contemporary. Proof, if any, is needed, that straightforward, highly immersive adventure stories can still be written in this day and age, and that a contemporary sensibility in literary historical fiction does not have to feel ironic or forced. While not a perfect novel, Into the Savage Country is a delight to read, and at the same time it carries the weight of meaning that makes any novel worthwhile.

The Martian

Andy Weir, 2014

A science fiction novel that’s also an old-fashioned man vs nature adventure story. It’s a highly original slant on this classic narrative type, of course, because of the setting and because the scenes are built almost entirely on scientific, technical, and logistical detail. This may sound grim to non-techies, but the fact is that it manages to maintain a propulsive current of suspense throughout. We can’t help rooting for Mark Watney, the uncomplaining, resourceful, MacGyver-like narrator in his hugely-against-the-odds quest to survive his stranding in the Martian wilderness. The novel is simply written and manages to maintain a strong, propulsive current of suspense throughout. Most of the book comes in the form of daily log entries, which are a good device for building suspense because they allow for an in-the-moment, non-reflective, forward-looking perspective. We can’t help rooting for the protagonist and his against-the-odds imperative to survive, so we become vitally invested in the complex procedures he must undertake.

The River

Peter Heller, 2019

Just about any Peter Heller novel would have been an excellent fit for this list, but The River ranks among this talented novelist’s best, with his trademark skills in creating suspenseful, page-turning narratives with contemporary wilderness settings on full display. It’s not only the plot of The River that makes it so readable, though Heller has skills of storytelling and pacing that any novelist would envy. The characters are beautifully drawn, too, and the beautiful, lyrical writing really brings the Alaskan wilderness to life. As Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.” After reading this, you will feel like you canoed down Heller's river yourself, and, like the characters, escaped just in time.

Lucky Turtle

Bill Roorbach, 2022

Lucky Turtle is that rare novelistic creature, a page-turner with a message of quiet, life-affirming optimism at its core. It’s set mostly in the Montana wilderness and offers a vision that is tense and dramatic, though nowhere near as dark as Conrad or McCarthy or Lily King. The warmth of the characters, the beautifully portrayed wilderness setting, the way the book manages to resonate with recent societal paradigm shifts while remaining imbued with a basic, enduring human wisdom that is ancient and universal, the fact that it’s a love story with a happy ending; Lucky Turtle falls squarely within the great American tradition of deeply humane, character-centered fiction set in the wide open spaces of the west, along with Wallace Stegner, Jim Harrison, Larry McMurtry, and Paulette Jiles—with a voice that is unassumingly poetic without a trace of self-absorption.

The Afterlife Project

With humanity facing imminent extinction, a team of scientists uses technology originally designed for interstellar travel to send a test subject ten millennia into Earth’s future. Marooned in an uninhabited wilderness, microbiologist Nicholas Hindman searches in vain for remnants of the human race. Meanwhile, back in 2068 A.D., the team’s head physicist and its doctor lead a small crew of survivors on a sailing voyage to a small volcanic island north of Sicily on a harrowing quest for a second viable test subject. A finalist for the 2023 Prism Prize for Climate Literature, the novel features a scientifically plausible mechanism for one-way time travel, a deep-future wilderness setting, and a search for spiritual meaning across the inconceivable vastness of geological time.